


The Corruptible Effects of Praise

by novamare



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Music, Alternate Universe - Vampire, BDSM, Bev is a good friend, Blood, Body Horror, Dissociation, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Painplay, Self-Harm, Slow Burn, Vampire!Hannibal, Will in subspace, mentions of abuse, metal!Will, very bad tattoo aftercare
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-06-30 14:00:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 56,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19854664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novamare/pseuds/novamare
Summary: Will Graham is the glassy eyed, heavily tattooed drummer for the Comfort Machine, an up-and-coming metal band on its first tour. After a mental breakdown at a gig in New York, Will becomes the patient of one Dr. Hannibal Lecter, an apparent fan and old school psychiatrist whose techniques are less than orthodox. Soon, Will starts to feel like he’s trapped in a dangerous fairytale, one that can only end with blood.





	1. A Rumbling from the Deep

**Author's Note:**

> Please check the tags! I will update as needed.
> 
> TW: blood, dissociation, self-harm, body horror

His ears are ringing, and it’s a blessing. When all the words in the world melt into a crumple of lies and platitudes and vague, babbling absurdities, his tinnitus is there to protect him. Ringing, until the rest is a hazy fuzz that he couldn’t repeat if he wanted to. It’s always like this, the ringing, the intense swell of fullness in his chest—he supposes it’s pride, although it’s harsher than that, like a tattoo gun digging into his flesh—the hallucinatory fog that’s taking up the space where his memory should be.

The overhead lights flicker on in a quick sequence from stage to bar, and he flinches with each row of fluorescents that come to life. The light burns his eyes like spotlights never do. The great, barren space in front of the stage is littered with crushed plastic cups and abandoned junk. The crowd is long gone, although the stench of them isn’t: sweat, beer, bad breath, smoke, a trace of vomit. He’s so used to the smell that it’s almost pleasant, and it makes his stomach growl. He hasn’t eaten in days, or it feels like it’s been that long. Maybe only a few hours. Maybe longer. He can’t remember. Curling in on itself, his body demands food, something to fuel its vicious and visceral hunger.

“Great set, man,” says some disembodied voice as a hand claps him hard on the shoulder. He flinches away from that, too. The only thing he doesn’t flinch from—couldn’t, no matter how it attacked him—is the music, still ringing in his ears, its pulse stronger than his heartbeat, although he can feel his blood pumping in a strange polyrhythm at his wrists and knuckles.

When he looks down, he realizes his hands are bleeding. Splinters of his drumsticks are lodged in his palms, and around the blond wood is molasses blood, glossy and reflecting the too-bright lights. It’s not unusual; this happens every show. Where Beverly has calluses on her fingertips, Will has scars crossing his hands, more prominent than the skin’s natural creases and cutting across a faded mess of ink.

He once went to a palm reader who told him he was a bizarre treat, a man completely out of touch, a slave to something greater than himself, although she couldn’t say what. Will can, though, and so can everyone else who knows him as more than the blank-eyed drummer for the Comfort Machine. Everyone who knows him knows his eyes go glassy because he goes somewhere else, somewhere floating just above—or perhaps beneath—reality. Somewhere where the splinters don’t hurt but rather burn like a ravishing fever. Somewhere where the ringing in his ears is its own instrument.

He has to remind himself to breathe, and it’s a labor that exhausts him, although he rarely has much energy left after a show to begin with. He gives himself completely every night. And it’s a good thing he does it for himself, because most of the band’s fans barely know his name.

“Will.”

It’s Beverly who comes up behind him, wrapping her arm around his shoulder. She’s glowing, haloed by the spotlight that suddenly cuts out. She’s stripped out of her red leather jacket, leaving only a thin, ribbed tank top that shows her pierced nipples underneath. She’s breathing hard, too, and Will is charmed by the slick of sweat across her chest, the pristine skin of her body. She’s his best friend, really the only friend he’s ever had. She’s never cared that he flinches from her.

“Come on, we’ve got to get going.”

Recoiling into his mind is a slow process that’s never quite finished until he wakes up the next day, but it begins about now, as his blurred vision starts to clear up, and the ringing lazily quiets itself. He begs it to come back, wants to shove his head into the cavity of his kick drum as it echoes, wishes he could deafen himself with the only beautiful thing he’s ever known.

It’s a strange sensation of falling upwards, out of control in the worst way, and Will shakes his head and blinks hard, swallowing again and again until he can’t taste his own sweat anymore. He’s suddenly aware of the itch at his face, where his curls are plastered to his forehead and cheeks. He reaches up to run a bloody hand through his hair, pushing it back until it stays, and he swallows once more for good measure before saying, “What happened during Sweet Yesterday? We lost time.”

Beverly frowns as she corrals him out of the way of the road crew, who leave trails of movement behind them like sluggish animations as they wrap cables and break down Will’s drum kit. He can see the rusty stains even from the wings, splatters of memory lost to a trance, painting the calfskin bloody.

“Didn’t notice. Maybe your monitor was out of phase?”

But Will noticed, and he’s sure of it. When he comes down from his adrenaline high, his memory is blank but for the mistakes. Those he remembers clearly, without context, without noise. He can nearly hear himself, his entire body trembling as he finishes a chaotic fill, and the rest of them come in a splintered second too late. Zeller slurs his words, going too sharp on the chorus, voice cracking on the highest note. Price and Beverly hit asynchronously, and it jars Will now more than it did in the moment. Now that he’s back in his own head, able to form thoughts beyond _harder_ and _louder_ and _better_.

With each passing minute, the pain sets in deeper, and the sweat begins to burn in his cuts and splinters. The biggest splinter pierces the body a spider tattooed on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. He hisses as he pushes it deeper, until his vision clouds again—with tears now—before finally using his thumbnail to guide the shard out. It falls to the floor for someone else to clean, and Will lets Beverly lead him to the venue’s loading dock, where the rest of the band and their manager, Jack, stand chatting with each other. Jack’s holding the magazine that just reviewed their new album.

“This opens so many doors for us,” he's saying, but Will doesn't care. Not right now. He will in the morning, when success is defined by numbers again. For now, it's a game of sensations. He feels successful and he's sure he would even if the critic hated _Under a Gypsy Moon_. But Jack’s right, and Will feels a distant pride.

Price grins as Bev and Will come up, and he says, “Great show, guys.” Will doesn't have the heart to ask about Sweet Tomorrow again, but it still gnaws at him. Hopefully he can find a recording online, so he can post mortem. It’ll drive him crazy—crazier than he already is—if he doesn’t know. Can’t fix it.

Price takes a chilled water bottle from a roadie and raises it in a salute. Zeller’s got a beer and the bartender on his arm as he meets the salute and says, not short of a little sarcasm, “Now on to New York. What a dream!”

But dreamlike is a good way to describe the state in which Will exists, he thinks. Not quite real, but trapped in a too real body. Ephemeral, just beneath consciousness. Taking the water offered to him, he drinks it down in one go. He shivers against the dribbles that spill down his bare chest, washing away the sweat and blood splatter in neat rivulets, leaving only his tattoos behind. There’s not a bare inch on his chest or stomach or back or arms. His lower legs are equally hidden, but above his knees and up to his groin still have room to fill. They look pristine in comparison. Too pale, too flat. He’ll finish them someday. Being tattooed has the same effect on him as performing, sending him into a miasmic dreamland, where the pain feels too good.

“New York’s almost sold out, isn’t it?” Bev asks Jack. Her voice, higher than the rest of them, is harder to hear under the ringing in his ears.

Nodding, Jack says, “Your big break is closer than you know.”

He’s been saying that for years, but this is the first time he almost sounds like he means it. Will crumples the empty bottle and rubs his thumb into the grooves of its cap until it chafes. The come down is the worst part, and all he wants is to go to sleep, skip all this half-here-half-gone, and wake up in control of himself again. Or sink deeper into it again, like an addiction. He knows he’s addicted—he’s heard his own words come from the mouths of junkies and drunks—but he’s convinced there’s no cure for him. His options, as far as he can see, are limited.

More of the music, more of the splintered pleasure, more of the tattoos and hunger, more of the ringing and the flinching and the power. Or death.

***

They take a cab back to their hotel, all piled in together, sweaty and tired and too loud. Will is pressed up against the door, his breaths fogging the windows, while Price is going on about his brother.

“—nally prove that I’m the better twin, and fuck him for ever saying otherwise!”

Will isn’t the only one tired of hearing about Price’s feud with his brother. Bev, squeezed between Will and Zeller, reaches over the singer to slap Price’s knee, saying, “Will you shut the _fuck_ up?” She has the gift of being blunt without real heat, and Price takes the message. Bev smiles and, after a blessed moment of silence, says, “Cute city, great venue. Hope we play here again.”

They’re in Baltimore. It would have been Annapolis, except the venue there double booked the night and fucked them over. The other band had just released their fifth album. The Comfort Machine’s just got the one. Everything else, all the demos and the EPs and the YouTube videos, they apparently don’t count. Jack said they were lucky to find another venue on such short notice. It didn’t seem to matter much, though; the show was high-energy, packed from stage to bar with thrashing fans, and Baltimore has treated them well so far.

And then they barely avoid getting t-boned at an intersection as some glossy red car runs a light. The cab driver lays on the horn, and Will’s head spirals. He stares out the window at the back of the car that could have killed them, not half as rattled as he should be. Maybe it’s the dark, maybe it’s the distance, but he can’t see anyone in the mirrors.

“Fucking asshole,” Zeller says—slurs—as the cab driver turns into their hotel’s parking lot.

Jack, sitting in the front seat and scrolling on his phone, turns to frown at them. “News is saying there was an earthquake during the show. Did you feel it?”

“Earthquake?” Price looks like he’s about to say something about his brother again before he thinks better of it and just says, “In Baltimore? Do those happen?”

Shrugging, Jack says, “Seems strange.”

Will didn’t feel a thing except the rumbling of his bass drums. His calves are still burning. He’s been playing for damn near twenty years, and it still hurts. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

The cab stops, and Jack pulls an envelope of cash from his jacket, handing a stack of small bills to the driver. And then Beverly is reaching across Will to open the door, and he nearly falls out of the car. His legs are shaky under him, and he’s suddenly aware of his own fatigue. It’s a good thing he rooms with Bev and not Zeller, who has a habit of finding company in the wee hours. Price likes to complain about that, too.

By the time they make it up to their rooms, Will thinks he’s going to be sick. His stomach turns on itself and he wretches over the toilet as Bev washes her face. Dark makeup streaks down her face as she turns to him and asks, “Are you okay, Will?”

“I’m fine.”

“No,” she says, reaching for a too-white, too-stiff hand towel, “you know what I mean.”

Will sits back on his heels, rubbing the palms of his hands down the black denim that pulls across his thighs. Doing so reopens the cuts on his hands, and the blood leaves wet marks before it dries into the material. It would stain, if every inch hadn’t already been stained. His knees, bare where his jeans are worn and ripped, dig into the tile floor, and he focuses on that instead of the hunger. “I’m just tired. I’ll be fine in the morning.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him, but she doesn’t press any harder. Grateful, Will offers her a forced smile, but she just shakes her head and starts brushing her teeth.

He falls asleep almost as soon as he crawls into bed, but he doesn’t sleep well. Never has, likely never will, he thinks. It’s just nightmares and terrors all the way down, so sweaty the too-crisp hotel sheets stick to his back, so sore he tosses and turns until he’s half hanging off the bed. Beverly turns the fan on as high as it goes, in part to help keep him cool, but also to drown out his helpless, wordless moaning. His sleep is hardly restful, but it’s better than being awake in a body that doesn’t feel like his. Better than floating just high enough above himself to see the dark circles under his eyes, the blankness of them. It’s a minor comfort, just enough to get him through the nightmares, that he’ll be better in the morning.

***

_Miles of perfectly clear water, rippling, warm, separate him from the surface. Refreshing as he breathes deeply, sucking the water in until it fills him completely, until he is nothing but a jellyfish in the currents, carried away and beautiful. Schools of flitting fish, sharp-toothed and hungry sharks, whales so large their hearts shouldn’t be able to sustain them, derelict skeletons of ocean liners and forgotten aircraft, a gentle mermaid with her blonde hair wrapped around her throat._

_The water weighs him down, keeps him suspended in the endless miles of drowning. He’ll never touch another person as long as he lives, as long as he drifts along, as long as he is kept in this too-gentle prison._

_A fisherman’s boat overhead, with a hook sinking deep, close but not close enough. He craves the rip of a fishhook through his flesh, the barotraumas of a breathless ascent, the freezing suffocation of that first air, the validation of being wanted, the pride of being an expensive delicacy eaten alive. But he can’t reach out—paralyzed, pulled away too quickly—and the chance is gone for the next eternity._

_He opens his mouth to cry, scream, beg for the fisherman to follow him, but nothing comes from his lips. Not even a string of bubbles to trace the way to the surface. Maybe he’s crying, but he can’t tell tears from the rest of the hypnotic sea._

***

Will is awake by the time Jack knocks on their door and lets himself in a split second later. He’s been up for the better part of an hour, even though the sun has yet to rise, even though, by his estimate, he slept for no more than four and a half hours. Still, he appreciates how quiet Jack is as he comes in, how carefully he jostles Beverly’s foot. She jerks awake, less violently than Will did, and reaches up to rub at her eyes as she says, “Fuck me, it’s early.”

The clock on the table between their beds flashes 7:03, and Will has spent the last half hour timing his breaths to the pulsing red numbers. Four flashes in, eight flashes out, all while subdividing the flashes into complex rhythms and visualizing them spread across toms and snares and cymbals. He can almost hear the patterns he’s never played, some of them resonating with his heartbeat, his steady breaths. He hesitates to call himself metronomic, although he has a very good sense of tempo, because even his body’s unconscious rhythms falter every now and again. A cardiac arrhythmia, hyperventilation, a convulsive twitch in his thighs or fingers.

“Up and at ‘em, you two. Time to get on the road.” Jack eyes Will up, and suddenly Will is more self-conscious of his sweat-stained t-shirt and the way his painted skin pulls over the sharp points of his skeleton. There have been several minor interventions, where Jack and Bev sit him down with a large plate of food and don’t let him leave until he’s so full he has to vomit it up later just so the fullness in his gut doesn’t make him dizzy. He’s confused by it himself. For a man consumed by an inescapable and insatiable hunger, his body tends to revolt against food richer than coffee and crackers. In a cruel strike of irony, his stomach growls loudly, and Jack, halfway back to the door, pauses to turn, raise a brow, and say, “Breakfast in the lobby. Van leaves at eight.”

And then he’s gone, and Will sighs, letting himself sink as far into the bed as he possibly can. Beverly crawls out of her bed, running a hand through her long hair, untangling the worst knots with her fingers.

“How did you sleep?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know.

Will shrugs. He doesn’t remember his nightmares, just that he’s cold and his limbs feel too heavy. “I slept,” he says, a sort of consolation. In some ways, it is. He does feel better now, although his scale is thrown out of balance from a desperate lack of calibration. “What about you?”

Disappearing into the bathroom and turning the shower taps, Bev says, “Fine. But I can’t fucking wait to sleep in tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

They all are, Will knows. It’s been a week and a half of shows in a different city every night. New York marks the end of the madness, for a few days, at least. After New York, they have a week to get out to California to start the second half of their ambitious tour, and they could all probably use some time away from each other. Price and Zeller are at each other's throats whenever they aren’t on stage, and Jack’s tired of playing babysitter.

Will just wants to curl up with his dogs. He misses them more than any other part of normal life. He misses his secluded house, the banged up drum kit he can ravage when he can’t sleep without neighbors telling him to quiet down.

“I think I might get some new ink,” Will says as he rolls out of bed and follows Bev into the bathroom. She’s already in the shower with the curtain drawn, although he can see her hair piled up on her head through a clear inset of plastic near the curtain’s top edge. He strips out of his t-shirt in front of the mirror and runs his fingertips over the octopus tentacles that curl around the left side of his rib cage. The prominence of his bones warps the shading of the tattoo, and he thinks there’s room between two of the tentacles for something small. Or maybe he’ll try to fill the emptiness beneath his hips.

He can hear Bev squeezing out her hair before she cuts the water and slides the curtain open, reaching for a towel. Will can’t help but glance at her as she climbs out of the shower, yet again struck by a low envy that he doesn’t want to think about. To distract himself, he pulls down his underwear and steps into the shower himself, turning the water back on as hot as it goes. She watches him as he moves, her eyes catching on the pale skin at his thighs.

“You should do a tribute. Our logo or something.” Will frowns at her, and a wry grin pulls at her lips. “I’ll give you my autograph if you want to get it across your ass.”

“Only if you get mine across yours!” He draws the shower curtain closed with a satisfying swish, and Bev cackles behind it. Will can hear the soft padding of her feet as she retreats back into the room to dress, and he lets out a low sigh as he pushes his face under the shower’s stream.

The water is close to boiling, and his skin pinks almost instantly. Steam fills the bathroom, so thick Will can barely see the other end of the shower as he massages his scalp with a glob of hotel shampoo. It smells too bright, too minty, but its sharp tingle is strangely pleasant, and Will lets it sit longer than he usually would before rinsing his hair and starting to scrub himself down with soap that makes his skin feel too tight. He’s harsh with a washcloth, as if trying to scour all his tattoos away, but they steadfastly remain.

When he steps out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his hips to hide the bareness of his ass, he looks at himself in the steamed over mirror. He reaches out to swipe a clearing in the condensation, and then he’s faced with his own visible fatigue. He hasn’t shaved since the tour began, and his stubble is quickly becoming a short beard. His eyes look more gray than blue, and his crooked nose somehow looks more crooked at the bridge.

Beverly is dressed and sitting at the hotel room’s desk with eyeliner in hand as Will emerges, his sopping curls plastered to the back of his neck. If he were alone, he’d give his head a sharp shake like his dogs do. But no matter how much he trusts Bev—and he does, sometimes more than he trusts himself—he knows she’d laugh at him, and he doesn’t feel like defending himself yet. It’s still too early for that.

“You want to eat?” Bev asks as Will gets dressed. For as little clothing as he likes to wear on stage—it only gets in the way or makes him overheat or otherwise distracts him from his music, the only thing that matters—Will likes to cover up otherwise. The green flannel he chooses is probably ten years old, comfortable and familiar, and it covers his arms down to the wrists, so only the tattoos and scars of his hands are visible. The ink is faded and blurring one design into the others. Only the pale and glossy scar tissue is sharp, distinct from the rest. He’s tried to tattoo over it, but the ink doesn’t take quite right, and after only a few months, it’s pure again.

Nodding, he runs his fingers through his hair and says, “Ready whenever you are. Bets on whether Zeller’s gonna make it?”

“Bet he will, even if only because Jimmy’ll drag him out by his ear.” Bev grins as she pulls on her boots and slips into her usual red leather jacket. “Old bastard is mean in the mornings,” she jokes. “Always bitching about bedtime and brothers and other bullshit.”

***

To Will’s slight surprise, Zeller is already sitting at a table in the far side of the hotel’s lobby. He’s holding his head in his hands while Price, sitting across from him, chatters on. They both look too pale, with dark bags under their eyes, but Zeller looks worse.

“Hungover?” Will asks with a tiny smirk as he and Bev take their seats after stopping at the small breakfast bar. Will’s got a chocolate pastry, two strips of floppy, greasy bacon, and a cup of horrifically burnt coffee, but he’s of half a mind to go back for a bottle of orange juice before they hit the road. He might be a bit paranoid, but he swears he can feel himself getting sick.

“Fuck off,” Zeller says, his agony palpable in the crack of his voice. Jack keeps telling him to see a coach to make the singing and screaming less harsh on his vocal cords, but Zeller’s not one to take advice. Like Will, he seems to enjoy the suffering.

The other three laugh as Jack comes to the table with a plate full of scrambled eggs and breakfast sausages and says, “Good morning, team. Last busy day for a while…everyone ready?” He gets a tired round of nods and affirmatives, and that’s good enough.

“Like I was telling the drunk,” Price begins, gesturing lazily at Zeller across the table from him, who glares back but says nothing in his own defense as he cradles a cup of coffee, “did anyone see the news this morning? They’re saying the epicenter of that freak earthquake was, what, less than a mile from the venue? How crazy is that?”

Bev takes a huge bite of her croissant and says through the flaking layers, “Crazier we didn’t feel it.”

Shrugging, Zeller finishes off his coffee. “Power of metal, I guess.” He tosses up a lazy, bent-fingered sign of the horns—his favorite way of mocking himself and the rest of the industry; when he’s sober, Zeller’s always happy to go on about Dio and Gene and the rest of his “forefathers” with a careful, familial disdain—as he stands to get a refill.

Although he knows Zeller is joking, Will thinks he’s not far off. The entire venue was thrumming, and it’s not entirely impossible that the earthquake happened to rumble just in time with some particularly brutal chorus, maybe one from Bride in a Bottle, or the slam in Animas. Or, Will considers suddenly, perhaps even during the breakdown fill of Sweet Yesterday, throwing everyone just a little out of time. He pulls his phone from his pocket and starts searching for videos from the show. None have been uploaded yet. He sighs and hopes he’ll remember to look again later, closer to New York.

At exactly eight, Jack claps his hands and says, “Alright, gang. Let’s get going. Can’t be late for your first big interview.”

“Interview?” Bev frowns. “What interview?”

Jack grins and pulls out the same magazine from the night before, flipping to their review. The album’s art covers most of the page in a vaguely artistic splash, and the score is printed in big numbers beside the headline.

_Newcomers Tell Vets Not to Get Too Comfortable_

The byline is small, and Will has to squint to read it as Jack says, “Revolver wants to do a full article.”

Reaching out to take the magazine from Jack, Will gets his first taste of their critical reception. Freddie Lounds awards them a 7/10, with praise for their technical abilities—especially in the drums, which makes Will smile to himself—and the narrative power of their lyrics. She questions the quality of the vocals, saying Zeller is better harsh than clean, and finishes saying " _Under a Gypsy Moon_ is clearly a debut effort, but one with an alarming amount of promise, if only the Comfort Machine doesn’t get too comfortable themselves.”

Will rolls his eyes and slides the magazine back to Jack just as Price says, “They give you a list of questions? Preparation’s key, you know.”

“Yeah,” Jack says flatly as he produces a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it over to Price. “It’s all there, prep to your heart’s content. Take some time with that last one.”

Reading over the list, Price’s brow furrows. “ _Gypsy_ references a wide array of mythologies. If you had to choose, which mythical creature would you be?” He seems to reread the question a few times, just to make sure, then he glances around the table for reactions. “You have to be kidding.”

Jack shakes his head, a bit sheepishly. “Ms. Lounds is an unconventional one, it seems.”

Will snorts, finishing his bacon and following it with a long swig of bitter coffee. “Better start thinking now. Werewolf? Fairy? Jackalope?” Price glares at him, and he returns the favor with a wry wink.

An alarm chirps, and Jack checks his phone and clicks his tongue chidingly. “Late already! Let’s go!”

With some reluctance—as well as another cup of coffee for Zeller and that bottle of juice for Will—they collect their bags and trudge out to the parking lot, loading up on their van, which they sometimes delude themselves into calling a tour bus. Will curls up in the very back row, against the window and trapped in by a pile of drum cases that their road crew packed in after the show. Bev sits in the row ahead of him with Zeller, each on opposite sides, and Price is in the passenger seat beside Jack, who’s taken it upon himself to cover the first shift driving.

They listen to the radio, not their own music, and Zeller passes out before they even get on the interstate. Will just closes his eyes and tries not to imagine himself as a mermaid with his hair wrapped around his throat. It’s one of the only images from his recurring nightmares that he remembers, benign in a way that makes him too scared to imagine all the things he can’t hold onto as sleep fades.

***

Bev takes the next shift driving, and that’s when Will emerges from his curled cocoon to sit shotgun, his knee bouncing in time with the radio. Bev likes classic rock, and her favorite station is halfway through a Cream appreciation hour. Tapping her short, painted fingernails against the steering wheel, she glances over at Will and says, “I’m stuck between dragon and sphinx.”

At first he’s confused, but then he laughs and shakes his head. “Don’t overthink it,” he says, cracking his knuckles one by one. “Dragon. Let Lounds flounder in racial insensitivity.”

“Asshole,” Bev says without heat, the way she’s so skilled at. It’s then that Will realizes he feels comfortable. Not consumed by ecstasy like he is when on stage, but also not crushed under the gravity of his comedown. He’s a little bored, and that’s okay. Better bored than at either extreme. It’s just a shame, he thinks, that boredom is always broken eventually.

And as the city skyline becomes visible though a dense fog, he wonders if it’s possible to be bored in New York at all.


	2. Lovesick Fool

They’re late for their interview, although only by twenty minutes. And really, Zeller is saying to anyone who will listen, it’s only because traffic in the tunnel was atrocious, and the security guy at the garage was giving them trouble, and there was a line at the front desk, and whatever other bullshit he can think of. In reality, Will knows, they lost at least that long stopping at gas stations for Zeller to piss out the gallon of coffee he drank.

“It’s goes right through me, okay?” he said every time.

A woman in a loud skirt suit—horrifically red, with a faint tartan weave, and a bit short, but otherwise neat in its presentation—is waiting for them in a small conference room. All Will sees is the wild mess of copper curls that clashes with her outfit, and his first instinct is to ask how to keep his own curls from frizzing out with the city humidity, which feels more electrically charged than the bayou sort he’s used to. But she’s too quick in greeting them with a wide smile and firm handshakes.

“Hi, welcome to Revolver! Thanks for coming. I’m Freddie,” she says, gesturing for them to sit around the conference table. “Loved the album. Can’t wait to discuss! Can I get you anything to drink?”

Zeller perks up immediately, and Will shares a knowing glance with Price, who’s the poor soul that has to deal with Zeller’s playboy tendencies up close. Flashing Freddie a warm smirk, Zeller says, “Got a cup of coffee, love? No cream, two sugars.”

Although her smile is unfazed, Will thinks he can see a flash of irritation pass behind Freddie’s too-blue eyes. But she nods politely and looks to the rest of them. Jack asks for a water, and Bev makes it two. Will declines, and Price says he’ll take some tomato juice, if they have any. To no one’s surprise, Freddie tells him they don’t, and then she’s off to fill orders like an overpaid, overdressed waitress.

At least she’s good at it. When she comes back and hands Zeller his coffee, he takes an appraising sip and hums in approval. “Couldn’t have done it better myself,” he says with a wink. Bev’s attempt to stifle her laugh is mostly unsuccessful, and she snorts into her water cup.

“So, let’s jump right in,” Freddie says as she sits at the head of the table and straightens her notepad in front of her. “Can you guys just describe your style for me real quick?”

***

It turns out that Will hates giving interviews. Strangers that come too close are his least favorite people, and no matter how many personal details Freddie likes to toss in between questions, she’s still a stranger, and she tries to get entirely too close.

She’s leaning forward in her chair, legs crossed at the knees, and staring intently at Will. Batting her eyelashes at him, she says, “So, Will,” and Will wonders if he’s at that point in his career yet where he can ask her to call him Mr. Graham or Dr. Machine or something more formal. He doesn’t think so. Maybe after the next album. Maybe after the first world tour. Maybe after he finds the fan accounts tracking his every move. He thinks Freddie would probably run one of them.

“Yes?” His voice is low, deadpan, and Bev elbows him in the ribs in the universal sign of _be nice_. Nice, nice, Will’s not sure he knows how to be nice. Quiet, sure. But nice?

Freddie isn’t flustered a bit. “Your technique is incredible! A real highlight of the album. Can you tell me how you learned to play?”

The truth isn’t interesting, so he elaborates.

“I grew up in Louisiana. Not much to do there, I guess, so I started banging on whatever I could find.” Freddie giggles, as if he’s said something cute, but he ignores it. “Pots, pans, walls, floors, trash cans, chests. Just playing along with whatever was on the radio.”

Smiling as she transcribes every word, Freddie glances up at him and bites her lip. “What was on the radio?”

How the fuck is he supposed to remember that? It was everything. His dad liked the change the station depending on the weather. On cold days, jazz. On wet ones, country. On days the heat was so heavy and humid that even the air couldn’t move for its gravity, “Lots of Metallica.”

“Oh, wow,” she says, “I love Metallica!”

Will glances at Bev for help, and she just rolls her eyes. Then, he looks at Zeller, whose glare is nothing short of daggers. There is nothing Will would like more than to hand Freddie’s attention over to him, let him have what he wants and simultaneously take that fire focus off himself. But it’s not nice to tell Freddie that he doesn’t want to talk to her, although that’s exactly what he wants to say. So instead he just shrugs and says, “Doesn’t everyone?”

Finally Bev jumps in to save him, agreeing that she also loves Metallica, and that Kirk Hammett was such a huge inspiration to her growing up. As she goes on about her own musical upbringing—demanding parents, classical guitar lessons, teenage rebellion—Will sighs and slumps into his seat, trying to disappear into the fake leather upholstery.

Price also gets his word in, but Will isn’t paying much attention. He’s mostly trying to ignore the way Zeller’s eyes burn holes into him, and it manifests as rubbing his thumb against the inside of his opposite wrist until the skin there—covered by the vague, blurry approximation of a pocket watch—is raw and red under the ink. When he catches himself in the habit, he tugs down the sleeve of his flannel, hiding the evidence. It doesn’t do much for the impulse to keep rubbing.

“And what about you, Brian?” Freddie finally asks, finishing off the round table. She’s still smiling, but her voice lacks the same spark, and Will wishes he could bury his face in his hands without Bev kicking him. He’s going to hear about this later. All about it, as Zeller starts to complain about Metallica again.

“Well,” he starts up, and Will knows where this is going. “Call it blasphemy, but I’m not crazy about James’s voice. Stage presence, sure, guitar, absolutely, but vocally—if we’re sticking with the forefathers—I’m much more inspired by Axl and Ozzy and, of course, Lemmy.”

Freddie writes it all down, but Will would count himself absolutely shocked if the laundry list ends up in print. Print is dying, anyway, he thinks, and maybe it’s because they have to pay royalties just for mentioning the same twenty people over and over because of people like Zeller. That’s not to say that Will doesn’t appreciate those who came before him in the metal tradition, but there comes a point that all the reverence holds some bands back. He wants to do something new. He wants to write songs in new time signatures that don’t even have names. He wants to jury-rig a new kit with whatever he can find that sounds cool when hit hard and fast. He wants to be known for his creativity, not just his technique.

He’s had this conversation with the rest of them a hundred times. They always tell him it’s best to make a name for themselves first and _then_ get gutsy. They’re probably right. So for now, he’s all blast beats and aggressive fills and halftime breakdowns with blood-stained drum heads and splintering drumsticks.

“Very interesting,” Freddie says as Zeller finishes his tirade. Scribbling something on her notepad, she sits back in her seat, uncrosses her legs, and recrosses them the other way. Will feels like he knows which question is coming next. There’s something devious in her smile, and maybe it would read as playful to anyone else. All Will sees is danger, although he can’t quite explain why. Her teeth are too white, her eyes too blue, her hair too red, and her voice too bright as she says, “So, I have to ask.”

Bev clears her throat, and when everyone glances to her, she only covers her mouth with her fingers and says, “Sorry. Spit went down the wrong way.”

Taking her time to wind up to her last question—Will glances at the clock on the wall, annoyed beyond annoyance that there’s still ten minutes left in their scheduled meeting block—Freddie pushes a lock of curls behind one ear. “Of course,” she begins, although even she seems to regret this question now. And rightfully so, Will thinks. It’s a dumb question. “The lyrics in _Under a Gypsy Moon_ revolve around several mythological traditions—we’ve got werewolves and phoenixes and the pegasus—”

It’s an absolute stretch to say the album revolves around myth. The same way it’s a stretch to say that an opera revolves around the soprano’s hairpiece. Will pauses to consider that analogy, deciding he doesn’t actually know enough about opera to say if it’s accurate, but he likes how it sounds. His point is, he supposes, that, while elements of myth are present in the band’s lyrics, they’re to further the purpose of the narrative rather than be the narrative. Referencing the phoenix in Bride in a Bottle, with Zeller singing in his raspy baritone, “ _For every drop she drinks, another she sows, burning her heart to ashes, but another one rose,”_ does not a song about phoenixes make.

But this is a long argument that Will has no interest in debating, especially with Freddie Lounds.

“So, I have to ask,” she repeats, and a flush rises to her cheeks that clashes with both her hair and her outfit. She reads directly off her notepad as she asks, “If you had to choose, which mythological creature would you be?”

Thankfully, she turns to Zeller first.

“You know,” he nods contemplatively, as if he hasn’t been considering it all the way from Baltimore, “I’d like to think I’d be a Minotaur.”

The following silence is one part uncomfortable to two parts jaded, and then Price is next. He says he’d like to be a manticore, and then when Freddie asks about the band Manticore, he goes into a long tangent about Persian history and Dante’s _Inferno,_ and Will’s zoning out, staring at the clock, by the time he finishes his explanation. It’s a minute past their allotted time, and he gives Jack a desperate glance, hoping he’ll offer one of his usual schedule crunching reminders.

No dice. The man’s hiding in his water cup that’s been empty for the past twenty minutes.

“Beverly? What about you?”

As if she can sense Will’s impatience to leave, and maybe she can, Bev says, “Dragon.”

“Dragon?” Freddie prods, tapping her pen against her notebook.

Bev nods. “Yeah, dragon.”

It’s hard for Will to contain his snort, although his failure is amplified as Freddie’s gaze turns back to him, and she smiles almost sheepishly. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone more foxlike in his life. She bats her eyelashes again, and Will wonders if anyone has ever found that at all seductive.

“What about you, Will?”

He falters for a moment, mindlessly rubbing at his wrist again, and shrugs. “I don’t know,” he suddenly wishes he had asked for a glass of water, “maybe a kraken or something.”

From the way Freddie’s eyes light up, he realizes that’s going to make it to print, and he hates it, because it’s not even the truth.

***

Jack gives them the rest of the afternoon to themselves before locking himself in a meeting with some other bigwig from the magazine. Price is immediately off to an art museum, but not before Bev can tease him about being old and boring.

“You’re in a metal band, for fuck’s sake,” she says, grinning, as they wait for the train. Will wraps his arms around himself even though he’s starting to sweat from the underground heat. He’s grateful they aren’t well known enough yet to be swarmed in public, although he’s not sure even the biggest names in the genre are.

Price mocks her in a high pitched voice before saying, “I also like baking and knitting, thank you.”

Grinning, Will chips in. “And I’ve got eight dogs that I would die for.”

“That’s sweet _and_ metal as fuck, though,” Bev says, slapping him playfully on the shoulder.

Zeller, leaning against a pillar and looking as moody as he can manage, glances over at them and shrugs, saying, “I’m going to hit a record shop in Greenwich Village, if anyone wants to come. They’ve got a cat.”

Part of Will wants to go with him, just to see the cat (and if _Gypsy_ is filed in the right place), but mostly he wants to be alone for a few hours, before the insanity has to ratchet itself up again. So he says, “Probably just going to find a quiet bar and ignore everyone. Maybe get a tattoo.”

“Where!” Price says.

Will shrugs and pulls his sleeve up to look over the chaos of color and shapes that disappears behind the fabric. “Might cover something up.”

Raising a brow in his direction, Bev opens her mouth as if to comment, but she sighs instead and says, “I’ll go with you, Brian.”

“Fucking finally,” Zeller mutters under his breath, “a woman who likes me.”

Bev snorts. “Yeah,” she says with a roll of her eyes, “don’t get your hopes up there, buddy.”

And then the train comes, and they all spread out through the car, with only Bev and Zeller sitting together. Will is happy to hide away in the corner seat, leaning his head against an advertisement for an online therapy service. Maybe that’s what he needs. Someone to listen to him chasing the ache, then running away from the recovery. Someone to tell him he’s fucking insane, that he needs more help than an online therapist can offer.

He’s rubbing at his wrist again, and when he catches himself doing that, he moves downward to scratch at the scabbing cuts on his hands. He thinks he got all the splinters out, but he knows it’s unlikely. Maybe there’s some rotting wood deep in his hands, just waiting for the right moment to give him gangrene and take away the only thing he’s good at.

That would be the ultimate torture, he thinks. He’s pretty sure that’s when he’ll kill himself, when he’s no longer able to play.

After the train lurches up to a platform, the doors open and Bev and Zeller disembark, waving goodbyes to them, although Will doesn’t quite register it until it’s too late to wave back. Then the train’s off again, and he realizes he doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t really care, either. He just knows he has to be at the venue back in Brooklyn by six.

It gives him entirely too much time to get lost but not nearly enough time to get found. The maudlin quality of that thought irks him, but he digs his phone out of his pocket to write it down anyway. It could make a good lyric for one of those songs that has to happen before they can get gutsy.

Price gets off at Herald Square, and Will keeps riding, only standing when a blonde woman in large sunglasses sits too close to him.

He decides Columbus Circle is as good a place as any, and as he makes his way through the station and up to the fresh air—although it’s not as fresh as he likes—Will is struck by how small he feels in the city. It sends a sharp pang of anxiety through him, making his hands shake, but he thinks he likes it. Or, rather, he doesn’t hate it as much as his instinct does.

And yet, it’s his instinct that draws him into Central Park, wandering deep into the ramble, where the rest of the tourists don’t quite make it.

The birdsong is louder here, and Will thinks he can make out the low whine of a blue jay under the constant trilling of cedar waxwings. He turns a corner and nearly runs into a small group of birders, each with binoculars up to their faces. Will follows their gazes, and tucked away high up in a tree just off the path is a large shadow that he figures must be a bird.

He eventually finds a bench to sit on, and then he pulls out his phone and presses in his earbuds.

With the volume at max, Will nods along with his own practice recordings, miming along with the hard parts. These are the times he remembers he’s going deaf, with nothing but the percussive cacophony in his ears. As well as his tinnitus hides itself in his daily life, it comes to the fore now, an overtone to the metallic ring of a crash cymbal.

People pass him by without catching his attention, until someone stops dead in front of him, and he glances up, half expecting someone to ask for an autograph. It’s wishful thinking, though, and the reality puts him on edge.

Standing too close is the woman from the train, now holding her sunglasses halfway off her nose to peer down at him. Her eyes are cold, blue but nearly gray, and her mouth is tense as she says, “You’re Will Graham, right?”

Yanking one earbud out, Will says, “What?”

Her stare darkens, and she repeats herself. “You’re Will Graham, the drummer?”

With a frown, Will pulls the other earbud out and wraps the cord around his fingers before slipping them back into his pocket. “Yeah,” he says without making eye contact.

“I need you to come with me,” the woman says, sliding her sunglasses back up as if the matter is solved.

Will crosses his arms over his chest. “I don’t know who you are.” Not to mention, he’s got a show in a few hours and still wants to find a tattoo shop to put him in the right state of mind or at least give him a solid head start. He’s been debating whether to cover something up—not because he no longer likes the designs on him but because he’s quickly running out of space and wants to preserve as much virgin skin for big pieces as he can; after all, big pieces on fresh skin hurt more, and what’s he there for if not the pain?

But the woman doesn’t seem to care. “My name is Bedelia.” Getting impatient, she says, “And I need you to come with me.” She holds out a hand to help him stand, but he steadfastly ignores it, happy to ignore her, too.

“Fuck off, lady,” he says, sounding more tired than angry.

“That’s not an option, Will.” He can feel her glare through the sunglasses, and he rolls his eyes as he stands up and starts walking off in the direction opposite the one she came. Following after him, she says, “You don’t realize what you’ve done, do you?”

No, he absolutely doesn’t, unless what he’s done is met one of those crazies New Yorkers always talk about. Except usually they don’t dress so nicely. Then, with an almost manic amusement, Will wonders if _he’s_ the crazy one. He certainly looks like one, with wild hair and stubble that’s quickly becoming a beard and torn up clothes and tattoos everywhere. It even crosses his mind briefly that he might be hallucinating her, although he decides that his imagination wouldn’t produce a woman in a pristine green blouse with manicured fingernails who goes by a name like Bedelia. That, and a few passersby glance over at them, and one man even shamelessly catcalls her. Will’s impressed that she ignores him rather than fights back, the way he knows Beverly would.

She manages to keep up with him, even though she’s wearing heels on the dirt paths. She probably has a drummer’s calves, he thinks, although not a drummer’s hands.

“If you don’t behave now, you’ll suffer later,” she warns, and she sounds like she believes herself, even though what she’s saying is absurd. No one’s said something like that to him since his father did when he was a child, and even then, it was usually in a bastardized creole, a family language that masked meaning to the outside world. Will wasn’t sure his father would have known the word “suffer,” although he certainly knew what it meant.

Will stops near Strawberry Fields and turns to give Bedelia a flat look that takes all his social energy. Now he really needs a drink and some ink. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and I don’t want to. Leave me alone.” He waits for her to start talking again, but she doesn’t, so he gives her a curt nod and says, “Thanks.”

When he walks off this time, she lets him go, although he can still feel her staring at him.

***

He ends up in a tattoo parlor with a glass of cheap bourbon in his right hand and his left hand pressed down on a table with a tattoo gun brushing over his knuckles, darkening up the letters that’ve been there since he was eighteen.

The tattoo artist is halfway through the C when she sits back to wipe down the excess ink and says, “Lovesick? What inspired that?”

Will shrugs. “Everything I’ve ever loved makes me feel sick, I guess.”

“But you still want it?” She reloads the needle and goes back in, not putting nearly as much pressure as Will wants on his bones. Part of him wants to ask her to make it hurt more, but she looks young, maybe just out of her apprenticeship, and he doesn’t want to give her any bad habits.

So he swallows down the rest of his bourbon and says, “Yeah. Of course.”

She glances up at him, letting the needle hover over his skin, close enough he can feel the vibrations in the air. There’s a careful curiosity in her dark eyes, and for a moment, she almost resembles Beverly. Nodding, she says, “I mean, who doesn’t, right?”

“Right,” he says, wishing he had more booze. He’s still too sober, and it’s quickly coming up on time for him to catch a train back to Brooklyn. But the low buzz and ache of the tattoo gun is helping, slowly but surely. As the tattoo artist finishes up the C and moves on to the K, Will swallows heavily and says, “I’ve got a show tonight, if you want to come by.”

He’s not entirely sure what he means by the invitation. Without a doubt, the tattoo artist is beautiful, with close cropped blue hair and a set of stars inked across her cheekbone. Somehow, she’s still softer than Freddie Lounds. But Will’s not like Zeller. He doesn’t want to fuck anyone who will have him. He barely wants to fuck anyone—it’s not something that comes easily to him for many reasons—and yet, there’s a strange, nagging feeling at the back of his neck that he needs to spend time with someone new, even if just for the evening.

She smiles, a faint but adorable blush rising to her cheeks and crossing her nose, and she says, “Thanks. I’ve got a couple appointments scheduled, but I’ll see what I can do.”

As she finishes the tattoo, slathering it with ointment and wrapping it up, Will realizes he doesn’t remember her name. And as much as he doesn’t understand about social interactions, he definitely knows it’s too late to ask now. So he just gives her a generous tip and says, “Thanks for the touch up. Ink doesn’t last long on my hands.”

“I can tell,” she says as she slips the cash into her bra. “Drummer?”

Will cocks his head to the side. “How could you tell?”

The tattoo artist winks, setting a hand between his shoulder blades to lead him back out to the parlor’s lobby. She’s much shorter than him, so small he thinks she’d never be able to hurt him the way he needs. Not without a tattoo gun in her hand, at least.

She hangs by the front counter, leaning against it so the neckline of her shirt pulls lower. Grinning at him, she grabs an iced coffee from behind the register and says, “Where’s that show?”

“Saint Vitus.” He hopes that’s enough because he doesn’t think he could point it out on a map.

Thankfully, her eyes light up in recognition. “Oh, cool. I live right around there, so I’ll for sure try to make it over.”

As he makes his way out, walking in one direction until he hits a train station—a more relaxing method than staring at a map on his phone and trusting it to lead him right—Will starts to regret asking her to come. He doesn’t know what to do with guests when he’s inside himself, and he sure as hell won’t know what to do when he’s high out of his mind, in a trance and chasing the sting of salt in his wounds.

Maybe he’ll ask Zeller.

***

By pure luck, he runs into Beverly at Union Station, waiting on an L train that’s been delayed for at least twenty minutes. Bodies pack too close together on the platform, and he’s sweating and listening to his practice recordings again, but Bev finds him and taps him on the shoulder. He flinches but pulls his earbuds out just as she says, loud enough that Will can hear her over the din, “Hey, long time no see.”

“Where’s Zeller?” Will frowns, looking around the platform for their bandmate, but he’s nowhere to be found.

Bev’s halfway through rolling her eyes when someone jostles her into Will and she glares at the offending commuter instead. The businessman doesn’t seem to notice, and she rolls her eyes again for good measure. “Asshole ditched me for a chick from the record store.”

Will can’t help but laugh. “Sounds about right.” He feels like he’s screaming, and maybe he is, but Bev still leans forward to hear him, and there’s some comfort in the fact that they’re all on the path to hearing loss. The perils of live music, he supposes. Bev at least wears earplugs sometimes. Will absolutely can’t stand them.

“So, new ink?” Bev asks, glancing him up and down as best she can on the cramped platform.

He raises his hand to show her his plastic-wrapped knuckles. Somehow the redness of his inflamed skin is visible under all the black. “Just a touch up this time,” he says. She was there with him when he got it done all those years ago. It feels like forever.

“You’re a lovesick fool.” She gives him a tiny wink, more tender than teasing, just as a deep rumbling sounds from one end of the platform.

Finally a train barrels into the station, and it’s a hard push and shove to board one of the last open cars. Biting his lip, Will tries to ignore the people touching him from every direction. He’s chest to chest with Bev, with only a chrome pole between them, and as they leave the station, catapulting out toward Brooklyn, he lets go of the pole and lets the press of bodies keep him standing.

They’re one of the first stops in Brooklyn, and Bev has to bully their way out, with Will following in the wake she leaves behind her.

On the walk to the venue, Bev gets a call from Price, who’s lost somewhere in the area, and it takes twenty minutes to find him huddled on a corner beside a little bodega, thoroughly charmed by a gray tabby cat.

“Can we get a band cat?” Price asks as they finally pull him away from his new best friend. Will gets it. He misses his dogs more than anything and can’t wait to wake up in the morning—or, hopefully, afternoon—and go back home. There’s nothing as pleasant, he’s found, as falling sprawled out on the floor and letting half a dozen dogs pile on top of him, weighing him down when his heart starts to fly away.

Bev actually seems to consider it before saying, “That’s a Jack question.”

They all know Jack won’t stand for it. Also, Will’s pretty sure Jack’s allergic.

They turn a corner and the venue is right there, and Jack’s directing a handful of burly guys as they pull cases out of the band’s van. Although they call them roadies, the Comfort Machine is far from having a dedicated a dedicated crew that travels with them, so Jack just hires help in each city and deals with the frustration of teaching a new crew how to set up each night. He’s probably got it down to something of a science now, Will thinks.

“Hey, Jack,” Price says as they duck into the shade of the awning of the neighboring deli. “Can we get a band cat?”

Their manager doesn’t even spare a glance. “What? No.”

With a shrug, Price says, “Just wait until we get to have stupid crazy riders. I’ll ask for a backstage cat named Comfort Animal.”

Will snickers, and Bev gives Price a playfully dark look.

Finally, when the last of the drum cases are carted into the venue, Jack turns to them and says, “Go on in, start getting ready.” He pauses, frowns. “Where’s Brian?”

“Getting laid, probably,” Bev says, but Jack looks like he wants more than she’s able or willing to give. She sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “I wasn’t interested enough to stick around and find out.”

Shaking his head, Jack reaches for his phone with one hand and waves them inside with the other. Always the multitasker, although Will doesn’t want to complain about it. He know that, without Jack, the Comfort Machine wouldn’t even be here. They’d still be in Price’s garage, pissing off the neighbors and bickering about nonsense. Bev likes to say it’s a miracle they’ve made it this far, and if that’s true, Jack must be the angel in charge.

As they cross the threshold, Will thinks he can hear Jack muttering under his breath, but his tinnitus is too loud to make out the words underneath the ringing.

***

It’s always a mad rush to set up before the doors open. There are a couple solutions to this that Will can see, but none of them are exactly easy. The most obvious of the solutions is to have a full time, traveling road crew that takes care of it all with an expert precision. Another potential solution is to have an opening act to give them the excuse of time between sets to finish up what didn’t happen when it should have.

Of course, either of these solutions requires more money or fame than the Comfort Machine currently has, and so they’re hustling, with ten minutes to doors, to make sure everything is where it should be.

Will sits behind his kit, moving stands an inch to the right, and then half an inch back to the left. The angle of his two kick drum pedals closes by a few degrees, then one gets moved with a stray cable, and he has to start over again. He’s lining up water bottles just to his side, making sure his microphone is close enough to catch his backup vocals—every time he adjusts the microphone, he thinks he really shouldn’t be singing; he’s a drummer for a reason—but not too close to hear the pops of spit or soft grunts of exertion.

When he’s finally satisfied with how it’s all arranged, just so, he slumps into his rib cage, wishing his stood had a back to lean against. Reaching out to brush a hand across the blood-splattered calfskin head of a floor tom, Will double checks the stick bag that hangs from its rim. He’s got six new pairs—more money in wood that splinters in a night than he’s spent on clothes in the past six months; although, he thinks, maybe he’s been neglecting his closet—and an old pair, stained with blood that’s even older than the band is, for good luck.

He’s so focused on his set up that he doesn’t notice Price in front of him until he flicks one of Will’s ride cymbals. The glittery resonance of it raises the hairs at the nape of Will’s neck as he startles and looks up to the bassist, saying, “What?”

“You want to watch all the folks come in?” Price grins and gestures to the bright hole at the back of the bar, where a handful of people are making their way inside. Will glances around the stage to find that Bev and Zeller and Jack and the crew whose names he doesn’t know are all gone. Scratching the back of his neck with a sheepish shrug, Will stands and follows Price offstage.

Now is about the time when his nerves start building in his gut, and tonight is no different. As the rest of them discuss the set list and crack jokes and get worked up, Will stares blankly out onto the stage, feeling cold without the bright lights on him. His hands twitch as he rehearses a few fills in his head, and his heart rate starts to rise even though he hasn’t exerted even a fraction of the energy he’ll put in once he’s playing.

The nerves keep him from feeling the ache in his fingers, and he hopes that’s enough to keep the swelling from affecting his performance.

“Right, so after Nefarious Circlejerking Priests of Hell,” Bev is saying, running a black fingernail down the printed set list while Zeller chuckles at his own genius song title, “comes Sweet Yesterday. Will, what were you saying about that yesterday?”

Will perks up when he hears his name and clears his throat. “Oh, just that we lost time. It was probably the earthquake.”

“Call it an experiment,” Price says. “If we do it again tonight, it’s our fault. If not, earthquake. Easy.”

Looking up from the glow of his phone screen, Jack frowns and interrupts. “Will?” Even though Will doesn’t respond, Jack continues. “You expecting anyone at the show tonight?”

All of them immediately stare at him, curious and demanding. He wants to curl up in a ball and disappear or go on stage and let himself float away. But it’s not time for that yet, so he just shrinks into himself as much as he can and says, “I invited the tattoo artist I saw today. Is that not okay?”

“No, no,” Jack says, tapping something out and not looking at him, “it’s fine. I’ll give the go ahead for a backstage pass.” Of course, a backstage pass would require a backstage, and this is not the kind of venue with one of those, but Will supposes it’ll give his guest free drinks or an excuse to press right up against the stage or stay late when the lingerers in the crowd are finally asked to leave. But it doesn’t matter. Backstage passes sound more official.

Jack wanders off toward a man wearing a venue staff t-shirt, and Bev takes the opportunity to turn to Will and punch him in the shoulder, too gentle to be pleasant. “Tattoo artist?”

Will shrugs. “She’s nice.”

“She?” Zeller pipes in, standing with one hip cocked out. “And I thought you were a fairy. Good thing I didn’t say anything to Freddie, then.” All three of them shoot Zeller a look, and he seems to take the message without insult, raising his hands as if in innocence and saying, “Sorry, sorry.”

There’s a brief moment in which Will thinks he can hear something rumbling above the tinnitus and the growing noise of the crowd that’s gathering in front of the stage, but it turns out it’s only his stomach. He looks around for some food, realizing he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, but can’t seem to find anything smaller than what looks like a giant, half-eaten burrito sitting unattended on top of an unused amp. Tapping Bev’s arm, he bends over to whisper in her ear, “Got gum or something? Little hungry.”

Bev’s look is as close to a concerned mother’s as Will can fathom, although he doesn’t have any experience to go by. She sighs and says, “I bet the bartenders would give you some fruit. Don’t eat too much. Blood is one thing, puke is another.”

He can’t help his grin as he thanks her and darts off to the bar, where he waits for abartender to ask him what he wants.

After ordering a double shot of whiskey with a handful of maraschino cherries, Will looks around for the tattoo artist, desperately trying to remember her name. Rebecca? Rachel? Rhonda? He swears it starts with an R. But no matter how hard he squints into the dark room, he can’t see the shock of blue hair, and he tries not to feel a little disappointed. Telling himself she’s probably still working, and that she’ll make it before they’re done, Will thanks the bartender and tips him with a few crumpled dollars from the pocket of his jeans, the same black pair he wears for every show.

The money is stiff with dried sweat, but the bartender doesn’t seem to care as he says, “Break a leg, man.”

Will gives him an awkward smile and tosses back the whiskey in one go, followed by the handful of cherries. By the way the bartender looks at him like he’s grown three heads, he supposes it’s not a typical request or behavior. But as soon as he swallows down the chewed, sugary mush, the grumbling in his stomach stops, and he feels ten pounds lighter.

As he leaves the bar, he glimpses himself in the mirrors behind it, and his lips are bright, artificial red. Although he doesn’t stick it out to check, he figures his tongue is, too. It makes him look more made up than he is, as if his skin has been painted white and his eyelashes darkened to match black hair. He knows it’s just the lighting, but he can’t help but take another glance as he goes back to the rest of the band. Although he always hopes for recordings of their performances—

Whipping out his phone, he remembers to search for a video from last night’s show. The glow of his screen is too bright in the dark, red-lit club, and the tinny speakers of his phone can’t compete with the noise. But after a little finagling of his keywords, Will finds a grainy video of Sweet Yesterday.

The video shakes as the person filming headbangs, but it starts to shake more violently, less rhythmically, just as the chorus is broken by Will’s wild fill. He watches himself through the video, and he feels just as much connection to it as he does to his actual body when performing—which is to say, none at all. He pauses the video and scrubs backward to replay the moment where the lights start to shake in a way they hadn’t before. A bright flash of the spotlight crosses his face in the video, and his eyes look glassy and dead. Frowning, Will notices that the earthquake lasts only as long as his fill does, and then the video goes back to typical mosh pit madness.

It’s a strange coincidence, he decides, slipping his phone back into his pocket, and nothing to think too much about. Stranger things have happened, like Zeller getting rejected by Freddie or Price going a full day without moaning about his brother. Although, he supposes, Price still has time.

When Jack rounds them up to give his usual pre-show pep-talk, the ache in Will’s fingers has started to fade, and the tattoo artist is still nowhere to be seen in the large crowd that’s packed like sardines up against the edge of the stage. They must not realize how smelly Zeller gets when he sweats. Will grins at the thought, if only to tuck away the low sting of disappointment. It’s not as if he was really counting on her showing up, he reminds himself. He’s done every other show without a special guest, he can do this one, too.

“Alright, gang,” Jack says, clapping one hand on Bev’s shoulder and the other on Zeller’s, leaving Price and Will to fill out the other side of the small, huddling circle. He has to almost scream to be heard, and even then, Will can’t quite make out what he says half the time. “Make it a good last show for the week! Energy! Power! Skill! Passion!”

Grinning brightly, Bev starts to bounce on the balls of her feet, her long hair jumping around her shoulders. Zeller rolls his shoulders and checks his breath in a cupped palm, and Price cracks his knuckles with a wince.

Will takes a deep breath, sinking into himself in an attempt to anchor himself long enough to get onstage before he lets himself go. And then, before he knows it, Bev’s looped her arm through his, dragging him up the steps to the stage, and the crowd is screaming so loud Will can’t hear the ringing in his ears anymore.

The lights are impossibly bright, and an animal instinct begins to take over as Will stumbles to his kit. It’s a familiar comfort to sit on his stool, to look out over bloodstained drumheads and see nothing but silhouettes against the blinding spotlight. He takes another deep breath and grabs his first pair of drumsticks for the night, holding them tight enough for the scabbed cuts on his hands to burn. His knuckles are angry red, but it’s not enough, so as Zeller introduces them, Will presses his freshly tattooed skin into the rim of his snare drum, tracing around its circumference, until all he can focus on is the fire in his fingers.

Drifting off is much quicker than coming back, and he very nearly misses the cue for their first song, except his body has a memory his mind doesn’t, and he comes in hard, just in time, and without a care in the world.

***

An unusual, alarming clarity yanks Will back into his mind halfway through the Bricklayer breakdown, and he blinks awake, feeling like he’s been hit by a truck or a train or that red car that nearly got them last night. His vision is blurred by tears, and a low panic fills him as he glances around the stage.

Zeller’s thrashing around, with his microphone cupped to his mouth, the cable wrapped several times around his arm, even though he’s only vaguely grunting. Price is dripping sweat, snarling as the cords of his neck look like they’re about to pop. Beverly’s chugging through her power chords and headbanging with the best of them, her hair traveling in perfect arcs, catching in the light like streamers. And beyond them, there’s the writhing mess of bodies with their characteristic stench.

Will feels naked, and as Zeller picks up into the next verse, he glances down at his hands, and they’re already bloody, moving without him.

It’s a nightmare, and he’s trapped in his head, without the freedom of a visceral escape. Just as Will begins to hyperventilate—or feel like it, since his heaving breaths are perpetually locked in time with the rhythm in his feet—the light catches on a single silhouette at the side of the crowd, standing perfectly still.

Not the tattoo artist.

Will makes eye contact, and as soon as he does, he’s catapulted back into the abyss to finish the show in his usual trance.


	3. La Petite Mort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEW CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror, self harm

He doesn’t remember his strange interlude when most of the crowd disperses back into the streets of Brooklyn and the road crew starts packing up. Like always, he remembers almost nothing. Except this time, it’s exactly nothing. He can’t recall a single mistake, and a drunken giddiness underpins his exhaustion.

Ears ringing, hands bleeding and buzzing, legs screaming in pain, head throbbing, Will’s so aroused it hurts, and the hurting turns him on even more.

When Beverly retrieves him this time, her hand brushes his bare, sweaty bicep, and for once, she’s the one that flinches away, saying, “You’re shivering. Are you okay?”

He’s more okay than he’s ever been, but his mouth is too gummy for words, so he just nods and lets her pull him offstage, back to the bar, where the rest of them are chatting with a few of the fans who’ve stuck around to meet them.

Jack focuses on him immediately, and Will can’t really hear him as he asks the same thing Bev did. Again, he nods, suddenly enthralled by his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar again. He’s drenched, with curls plastered to his face, and he can’t tell if the red at his lips is cherry juice or blood, even when his tongue darts out to taste it.

“Your guest is here,” Jack says loudly as he comes up beside Will, gesturing to the wall stretching from beside the bar back to the stage.

It’s not the tattoo artist.

Instead, it’s a tall, broad man who’s wearing entirely too much clothing for the heat of the season or the city or the venue. His hair is slicked back, his posture is easy and textbook perfect, and he’s staring back at Will with a tiny, wry smile at his thin lips. His eyes are dark, but they twinkle in the dim lights, and his mouth moves around words, although Will doesn’t think he could make them out from this distance even if he wasn’t going deaf.

“Jack,” Will murmurs, his voice slurring, but the manager has already gone off to see a group of photographers. Frowning, Will sees a shock of copper hair behind a few bodies, and he doesn’t remember Freddie saying she would come.

He glances around the bar again, looking for blue hair or a familiar smile, and although he finds nothing, the disappointment doesn’t come. It probably couldn’t, not through the intense pleasure—both physical and emotional—that comes from surrendering himself to the music. His jeans are too tight, so is his skin, and Will isn’t thinking about the tattoo artist anymore.

The sweat drying in a film over his entire body makes him feel invincible, even where it burns his open wounds. He studies his fresh tattoos with a hazy separation from the hot pain that’s radiating up his hands and wrists. Ink bleeds into the creases of his knuckles, and the plastic wrap is torn where the rim of a snare drum caught at it.

But it’s still there, LOVESICK, across both hands, separated into two words but belonging together.

He knows he shouldn’t hope for infection, but the thought of his hands, pus-swollen and weeping, catches in his gut and digs deeper and deeper until he imagines implanting drumsticks into the stumps of his amputated fingers, letting the wood replace bones, feeling the splinters from the inside. The ringing in his ears almost sounds like half a dozen cymbals reverberating in perfect time, all struck by nylon-tipped fingernails.

The man moves with a masculine grace that cuts through all the shifting, half-formed horrors and fantasies in Will’s mind. Watching him come closer, Will feels small, like he’s curling in on himself, and he palms his erection, trying to hide it in the shadow under the bar.

Stopping at the corner of the bar, as if he’s scared to see himself in the mirror, the man opens his mouth again, but his words are still lost to Will.

Until Will thinks he can hear something threaded through the tinnitus, nothing more than a whisper, reaching him and wrapping around him even though its syllables melt into the chaos. He thinks it says to him, “Come to me, _ma sirène_.”

Will’s body moves without him at first, and he sneaks one last glimpse of himself in the mirror—he looks younger, but his eyes are blacker than they should be, a great deal deeper, and notably still focused on the man in front of him. The reflection seems to ripple, and then his eyes are his again, meeting himself through the silvered glass like they should. Will swallows heavily, too far gone for logic but not for the visceral unease of his hallucinations.

“You play very well,” the man says as Will gets close enough to finally translate the movements of his lips into words. His voice is soft but firm and distinctly accented, although Will can’t place it on a map.

The compliment makes him shiver as it rolls down Will’s back like a bead of sweat or blood.

And then the man is reaching out to him, taking Will’s left hand in his own, larger ones, and examining it carefully. The touch of skin to skin—overheating and sweaty against cool and smooth—pulls a gasp from Will’s lips when words won’t come. A thumb brushes over the bleeding cuts and splinters, and Will wants the man to push the wood shards in deeper, wants to be pierced and broken, wants to see himself through the man’s eyes, separate from his body and more objective than Will can ever be.

“Do you enjoy the pain, Will?” the man asks as he turns Will’s hand over and sees the bold SICK across his knuckles. His careful smile widens, flashing too-bright, too-sharp teeth, and he glances down at Will’s crotch before looking up at him again. “Ah,” he says, giving Will a sultry wink, “perfect.”

Will’s intellectual mind doesn’t know what to make of that, but his animal body does, and his cock gives a twitch as a breathy moan comes in the place of words.

The man lets his hand go too soon, and Will wants to complain, but then a familiar touch brushes across the top of his bare back. He flinches away from Beverly, toward the stranger, as Bev looks curiously between them and says, “Thought you said _she_ , Will.” Her voice is hoarse, but her humor is fully intact as she gives the stranger a once over. “And you’d think a tattoo artist would have a few tattoos.”

He’s too far gone to try correcting her, and then he doesn’t have to worry about it, because the stranger is taking control of the situation with an ease that astounds Will, arouses him, and assuages at least one level of the anxiety buzzing in his body, making him shiver and tremble.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the man says, reaching a polite hand out to Bev, who takes the handshake in stride. “My name is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. I’m a fan.”

Although his mouth still isn’t following his mind’s instructions, Will finds that the man’s name comes naturally to his lips, and he tastes it as it jumps from teeth to lips and back to teeth again like a cherry pit, sweeter than cyanide. Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal Lecter. Will still can’t place him more specifically than Europe, and he doesn’t really care. The small, accented praises echo in his ears, louder than the ringing. The phantoms of touch at his hands thrum harder than the music.

Bev looks skeptical, and she says, “Thanks for making it out. Do you have a favorite song?”

His smile tightens, and he says, “I have a few. Tonight, the Bricklayer was particularly special.”

As soon as he says the song’s title, Will has a nearly identical moment of clarity, realizing that the eyes he met in the crowd were Hannibal’s. His gut clenches, and he can feel a sizzling energy to every extremity, every hair stands up, like he’s being electrocuted, and he thinks it’s as pleasant as dying.

He lets out a strangled moan as he comes in his pants. Bev looks at him, concern pulling at her face as it tends to do when he’s like this, and Hannibal’s smile is wicked, toothy, and too carefully hidden when Bev glances back at him, frowning. “I’m sorry,” she says, wrapping an arm around Will, rubbing gently at the revolver on his shoulder, which points directly at its twin on the opposite shoulder. “Shows really take it all out of him.”

“I can tell,” Hannibal says, the low amusement in his voice cutting through the shrill tinnitus.

Bev squeezes Will’s chin, staring directly into his eyes as much as he’ll let her, which isn't much at all. “Are you alright, Will?”

Swallowing heavily, Will finds his voice is cracking and deeper than he remembers. “I’m fine, Bev.” Her response is a dangerous look, one that says she won’t hesitate to drag him off and put him to bed if he’s lying, and for once, he’s not. “I promise.”

“Right,” she says, giving a nod to Hannibal, “thanks again for coming. Means a lot. Have a good one. Will, we’re heading out in about an hour. Jack wants make it back to D.C. before dawn.”

And then she’s gone, and Will is still shivering, focused on the sticky mess in his pants that he can’t clean up and the general discomfort in his hands, which is slowly but too quickly fading. He squeezes his fingers into fists, jostling the splinters and pushing them deeper, and rubs his knuckles against the rough material of his jeans until the raw skin smarts.

Hannibal takes him by the wrists and forces him to stop, his touch firm and impossible to disobey. Then comes the whisper in Will’s head, the one he doesn’t think passes through the space between them, the one he’s not even sure comes in a language he knows, but he understands it—although perhaps can’t decipher it— anyway as it says, “Stop, that’s my responsibility.”

He sucks in a shuddering breath and lets Hannibal bring his hands together, until his freshly inked tattoo is made whole and clear before him.“I was disappointed you didn’t come to see me earlier,” Hannibal says casually, although it makes Will’s head swim.

He’s already drowning, already half a step away from another nightmare. He thinks, if he could manage, maybe he can reach out and grab his forgotten dreams out of the nothingness, pull them back until they consume him like they do every night. But he can’t move. He’s paralyzed as Hannibal holds his wrists together out in front of him, like a prisoner being led from his old cell to a new one.

“What?” Will manages to say. He sounds drunker than Zeller, and it would shame him, if he were capable of emotions more complex than sheer, animal survival, a heady mix of fear and desire, pain and pleasure.

The grin is back, and Will’s heart rate rushes, so ahead of itself he thinks it might skip a beat. And then it does, and he’s suspended just above his body for a moment, until Hannibal says, “My friend paid you a visit in the park. I was hoping to meet you then, but you decided to make it difficult. I believe you owe me an apology.”

For as difficult as words are for him at the moment, Will can’t stop himself from saying, “I’m sorry, Hannibal.” His voice is too soft to be heard over the ruckus of road crew breaking down the stage.

“Louder, please.”

As Will repeats himself, louder and with a broken voice, a bright flash of light interrupts them. When Will looks to the source of the light, his vision is obscured by ghostly halos, although he thinks he can see a bush of coppery curls.

Hannibal’s face goes dark, shooting another pang of desire through Will, and his wrists are released as Hannibal steps up to Freddie and her photographer, saying something in what Will imagines is a polite but demanding tone. He can’t hear it, though, and he’s too busy rubbing at his wrists, trying to immortalize the cool touch of a stranger.

He keeps repeating his apologies into the empty space where Hannibal once stood.

***

Will disappears into the bathroom, glancing over his shoulder as he darts off to make sure Hannibal is still occupied with Freddie, now leading her toward the club’s exit. Will heaves a deep sigh as he locks himself in a grungy stall, leaning against the cold tile wall. Even if the graffitied obscenities rub off onto his bare skin, they’ll only blend into the sprawling designs across his back, and he feels safe trapped there.

He tries to calm his breathing, staring at the black toilet and imagining his head swirling in its bowl with the flushing water.

As Will reaches to unzip his jeans and push them down his thighs, he lets his eyes fall closed, lets his mind fill the lack of sensation with the fleeting memory of meeting Hannibal’s eyes across the stage, through the mass of sweating, screaming bodies.

Wrapping a hand around his cock, sticky with his own come, he finds that he’s not as spent as he should be.

Breathless moans fill the dead air where his tinnitus can’t reach, and Will sinks the ragged fingernails of his free hand into the sharp point of his hip, scratching upward with enough pressure to leave raised welts up to his ribs. But it does what he needs it to, and he’s so close to orgasm he thinks he’d rather die than stop now.

“Will? You in here?”

It’s Bev’s voice, echoing off every hard surface, and Will lets out a strangled yelp in response, squeezing himself hard enough that even his mental images swim and sparkle. With one last stroke, a stray splinter digging into an exceptionally tender spot on the underside of his shaft, Will climaxes without coming and crumples to the floor in a crying mess.

The stall door shakes as Bev says, sounding more scared than she has in a long time, “Will? Are you okay? Will? Open up!”

Space shivers around him, and lightheaded pleasure makes time stretch until he thinks he can see Bev’s desperation like a cloud slipping through the gaps around the door and forming a strange sort of golem that approaches him too slowly. His arm feels like it’s made of lead as he tries to reach out and destroy the smoky plume.

“I’m fine,” he says, but he doesn’t sound fine, even to his own ringing ears. The broken voice he hears doesn’t even feel like it belongs to him.

He sees what happens next from above, looking down into the stall at his own defective body, separate from it, too distant to feel its dread. His head sags to the side, his blood-streaked cock flops onto his thigh, and everything suddenly moves too fast.

The stall door finally gives, and Bev falls to her knees beside him, her hair forming a curtain around them, and it keeps Will from seeing the way his face contorts as Bev grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him, her voice a tense growl as she demands that he comes back, that he stands up, that he gives her friend back, that he tells her what’s wrong, that he gets help, that he doesn’t die this time.

It kills him that he can’t do any of the things she tells him to do.

And then she slaps him, hard and sharp, across the cheek, and suddenly he’s staring at her face through his own teary eyes again. Her eye makeup is smudged down past her eye sockets, creasing in her premature wrinkles, and her cheeks are flushed a deep red. He says her name, or some slurred sound that approximates it, and glances down at himself and the mess he’s created. He feels like he should start apologizing again.

He doesn’t have the energy to flinch away from her as she wraps her arms around him in the tightest hug he’s ever gotten. He can feel her racing heartbeat against his, two competing tempos too disparate to reconcile.

“Hold on,” she says as she hauls him up onto his feet. After guiding his hands to her shoulders, Bev ducks down again to pull Will’s jeans up. He leans against her, scared his own legs won’t hold his weight, until she stands again and holds his wrists tight, not unlike how Hannibal had before. But it’s not the same. “You need to sleep,” she says, slowly pulling him out of the stall and toward the bathroom door, and he’s grateful she doesn’t force him to wash his hands.

***

The crowd that surrounds them as they leave the bathroom seems like a hundred people deep in every direction, although Will can only make out a handful of faces. Jack, Zeller, Price, the bartender. And Hannibal. He blinks rapidly, reaching up to wipe away the gunk that blurs his vision, and takes a breath so deep his lungs feel like they’re about to pop.

“There he is,” Price says, just as Zeller says, “Power of metal.”

Jack pushes closer and claps a heavy hand on Will’s shoulder, saying, “You okay, Will?”

Everyone keeps asking if he’s okay, he thinks with a sudden bitterness that he can taste in the back of his throat like vomit. Of course he’s not okay—it seems so obvious to him that asking over and over is ridiculous. He wobbles on his feet, clearing his throat, and says, “Tired.”

Jack glances aside at Bev, and Will can see a silent conversation between them, although he can’t make it out. What he can make out is the whisper that wraps around his neck and teases at his ear like a lover’s breath, saying, “Ah, _ma sirène_ , but you are still asleep.” Will looks to Hannibal, who wears a careful look of concern but whose eyes flash with a less cautious interest. His mouth doesn’t move around the words, but Will thinks the whisper has his accent.

Finally Jack says, “Alright, you can sleep in the van. Let’s go.”

“If I may,” Hannibal says, reaching into his suit jacket to pull out a small card, handing it to Jack. “I’m a psychiatrist, and this episode is somewhat concerning.” A strange betrayal curls in Will’s gut, and he stares helplessly at Hannibal, who ignores him in favor of smiling at Jack and saying, “I believe what Will needs is dedicated monitoring, at least for the night.”

Will can feel Bev tense up behind him, and her voice is strained as she says, “I’ll watch him.”

As much as Will trusts her—and he does, with his entire being—he can’t help but want to push her away, because this isn’t her responsibility.

“Respectfully, Ms. Katz,” Hannibal says, and Will’s mind wanders off, trying to decide how he learned their names, “I’m sure Will appreciates your willingness to help, but this is a job for a trained professional. For anyone else, I would recommend a psychiatric ward, but I’m sensitive to the need to protect the band’s image. That Freddie Lounds won’t hesitate to write an exposé if she discovers our Will is hospitalized.”

Words keep coming from Hannibal’s mouth, all of them too long and winding to make sense to Will, but he’s caught on being called _our_ , as if he belongs to them, as if he’s a pet, a creature that keeps time and loses it, too.

“What are you saying, Dr. Lecter?” Jack interrupts, his frown making him look tired, older than he is.

Hannibal’s thin smile tightens, and Will bites his lip as he sees the fiery irritation in those dark eyes. “I am happy to observe him for the night,” he says, and then a dark humor colors his accent as he continues. “I’ll even return him in one piece in the morning. D.C., was it?”

There’s a quiet moment in which Will fights with himself, trying to focus on all the stimulus that’s overwhelming his mind. The too-dim lights, the stench of sweat and smoke and a musky cologne that threads underneath the rest, the ringing in his ears and the casual bickering of Price and Zeller, the strange sensation of simultaneously being too big and much too small. He’s shaking again, and Bev rubs a hand up and down his back, letting her short fingernails tickle the bumps of his spine.

“What do you think, Will?” she asks, and it’s more ridiculous than asking if he’s okay.

They all look at him expectantly, and he can only give a feeble shrug. He doesn’t want to burden Bev or stress anyone more than he already has, but even his impaired mind can’t ignore the potential threat of a stranger’s help. Except, he can still feel Hannibal’s touch at his wrists, still wants his whisper’s breath across his cheek. A distinct thought cuts through to him, even when all his others are vague impressions at best:

Dying in Hannibal’s care doesn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen to him.

“This is absurd,” Jack is saying, shaking his head and reaching out to grab Will by the arm.

But Will flinches away more violently than usual, and he manages to say, “No. I need help.” With the exhaustion garbling his voice, it nearly sounds like he says he needs _him_. But that’s just as true, Will thinks, and Jack scowls, looking to Bev for help.

She looks lost, and Will feels lost, too, until a firm hand settles on his upper back, just under his neck, and a thumb brushes over the knots of his spine. Instead of flinching back from the contact, Will begins to shiver again as Hannibal says, “I understand this can be a difficult process, but it’s a necessary one.” A sharper pressure comes from the hand at his neck, and Will arches back into the touch without thinking.

It’s Price that says, “Look, man, it’s just that we don’t know you. You could be a serial killer.”

“Will’d probably like that, though,” Zeller mutters, just loud enough for Will to hear, although he’s certain he wasn’t supposed to. But he doesn’t have the energy to be offended, and as usual, Zeller isn’t exactly wrong.

He can feel Hannibal’s quiet laugh as a rumbling down his spine, and he can hear his voice echoed as a whisper in his ear as the man says, “I’ve been doing this a very long time. I can assure you, Will is in good hands.”

A stray roadie bumbles up to the group, oblivious, and begins asking Jack if they’re free to go, and if they’re getting cash under the table or a check in the mail, and if the band ever needs a solid crew, he’s good for the job, and Jack has to say, “Not a good time, kid,” before he takes the hint and wanders back to his buddies by the door.

Jack sighs, reaching up to pinch his nose, and sighs again before shaking his head and saying, “Will’s an adult. He can do what he wants.” The blend of pleasure and fear that swirls in Will’s gut isn’t unfamiliar, but it’s more visceral than ever before, as if he couldn’t untwine the two if his life depended on it. And, he realizes as Jack rubs at his eyes, maybe his life does depend on it.

It’s a sudden thrill that threatens to choke him.

“Just make it in time for the next gig,” Jack says, a warning hidden behind his dark eyes.

Bev crosses her arms over her chest, searching Will’s eyes for something Will doesn’t think is there for her to find. And then she flings herself out to wrap her arms around him for the second time in the night, hugging him close enough that he can hear her whisper over anything else as she says, “Show up in California, Will. We need you.”

When she lets him go and takes a step back, everyone else follows her lead, giving Will the space to breathe, even if the air still doesn’t feel like it’s reaching his lungs.

Price is watching him intently, even from a distance, and it feels like a spotlight a hundred times brighter and more uncomfortable than any Will’s played under. He can’t meet the bassist’s eyes, so he just stares at his feet, studies the concrete floor, as the world moves around him.

In his periphery, he can see feet shuffling toward the door, and a sudden, leaden fatigue hits him. To keep himself from collapsing in exhaustion where he stands, Will tries to focus on Hannibal’s hand, slowly moving up his neck and squeezing tight enough that Will starts to feel lightheaded. But it’s the first time in a long time that he feels connected to his body, even if he has to rely on Hannibal to hold him together.

***

Before Will knows it, he’s laying flat in the leather backseat of a car—more luxurious than the band’s van could ever dream of—with a blanket wrapped around his bare shoulders. The door at his feet is open, and Hannibal is there, wiping his hands on a dark cloth.

“My clothes,” Will starts to say, his mouth cottony as he frees one hand from the blanket to rub at his eyes.

Hannibal offers him a soft smile and says, “In the trunk. Jack was kind enough to pull your things together before they left.” Tucking the cloth into his pocket, Hannibal makes sure Will’s feet are safely inside the car before closing the door. The brief touch radiates up Will’s legs, and even though he knows the courtesy was meaningless, he can’t help but curl his knees up into his chest, wanting to trap the feeling inside him forever.

The driver side door opens and Hannibal slides in, turning the ignition and putting the car into gear. The rumbling of the engine under Will calms him somewhat, and his breathing settles into a slow rhythm as Hannibal drives.

He can feel the controlled turns, the gutsy accelerating, the gentle braking. He has no idea where he’s going, and he doesn’t really care. All he can think about is that Hannibal is a much better driver than Jack or Bev or, god forbid, Zeller. Price is better, but slow, and Will doesn’t like to drive if he doesn’t have to. But now he doesn’t have to worry about navigation or safety or any of those other things that are too much for his mind at the moment. He just gets to lay there, wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket, and listen to the ringing in his ears.

And then he watches through half-lidded eyes as Hannibal reaches out to turn on the radio, and soft piano music fills the car, just enough to color his tinnitus. The small clock over the radio reads a little past two o’clock, and its hands glow softly in the dark. Street lights flash across the side of Hannibal’s face in a hypnotic rhythm, colorful in a way Will has never noticed before.

He falls asleep wondering if he’d wake up in a crash.

***

_A fishbowl, maybe a gallon of chemical water completely full. Trapped, swimming in circles around a large castle ornament, staring out the glass that warps the outside. He doesn’t remember if he’s seen this side before._

_Too-bright pebbles under him, too-bright light overhead, and when he catches glimpses of himself in the glass, his shifting form, half human, half red-scaled piscine, is too bright, too. The creature’s face is blurry, its long hair is blond and flowing, and the pale flesh is bare of ink, but somehow he’s sure it’s him._

_When he gets close enough to the glass to reach out and touch it, a sudden current swirls through the fishbowl, sweeping him away until he tumbles around himself and batters into the castle. Sharp, plastic edges cut into him, and his blood tinges the water pink. As he nurses his wounds, he is for once grateful to be trapped in a tiny fishbowl, with nothing to attack him as he heals. He calls it fantastic loneliness, hiding behind one of the castle’s towers as he stares out the glass, trying to remember if he’s seen this side before._

_All the sides look the same, but it doesn’t keep him from looking._

***

Will comes to as strong arms wrap under his knees and shoulders, carefully lifting him from where he’s sleeping. It’s his instinct to flail desperately, his mind clouded with restless sleep and the residual effects of his trance, and he only recognizes Hannibal once he’s accidentally kicked him in the side.

It happens in a split second, so fast Will can’t comprehend it, but he’s immediately back on the leather seat, with one hand at his sternum and another at one thigh, pinning him down with enough weight that Will feels like he can’t even wriggle around, although he certainly tries. Hannibal’s bent over him, and the whisper in Will’s ear says, “Stop fighting.” Although calmly spoken, Will is absolutely aware that it’s a demand, not a request.

He obeys, letting his entire body go limp, and stares up out the window to the predawn sky and the sparse tree canopy overhead. His breathing is shallow but mostly regular, and when he blinks a few times, the world clears up, and he can see Hannibal’s face, so close he can make out the fine wrinkles around his eyes.

Apparently satisfied Will won’t try to kick him again—although, Will thinks, he hadn’t consciously tried the first time—Hannibal ducks out of the car and holds a hand out to Will, saying, “Welcome to my home. I’ll observe you here until you have to get back to the band.” When Will takes the offered help, clambering out of the car with no grace and very little dignity, Hannibal smiles and continues. “It’s very late, verging on very early. You should shower, and then you can rest however long you like.”

Will thinks he’s being told he stinks, and at first he wants to argue, but then he catches a whiff of himself on the light breeze, and his face crumples in disgust. It’s all sour vomit and stale sweat and metallic blood and bitter sex. How had Hannibal managed to drive while smelling that? How long had it taken?

“Where are we?” Will’s voice cracks, but it’s stronger now than it was in Brooklyn. A telltale sign in the process of coming down.

“Baltimore.”

Frowning, Will slowly does the math. He was just here, he thinks. Just the day before. It’s strange to be back so soon, especially when he’s just started getting used to the touring life. He’s zoning out, and when he blinks back into himself, he realizes Hannibal, carrying Will’s bag at his side, is halfway up the walkway to the front door of a large, pale, and perfectly symmetrical house.

Will follows after him, all the aches in his body more deeply felt. The muscles in his legs burn, nearly giving out as he takes the stairs up to the porch, and his hands are in a sort of diluted agony, with his knuckles starting to itch where his skin tries to mend itself. His genitals hurt, too, and he can’t quite remember what he did to himself, although he remembers it feeling good in the moment. No, not just good. Euphoric. Intoxicating. Cataclysmic in a way Will can’t put into words right now, although he doubts he’ll be able to even once he’s finished putting himself back together again.

He enters the house after Hannibal and is immediately overwhelmed by the sensory weight of the foyer. Everything is rich, dark, expensive, old, and Will feels distinctly out of place. Thankfully, Hannibal is quick about leading him through the house to a small guest bedroom, immaculately decorated in deep burgundies, where he stops, sets Will’s bag on an leather armchair in the corner, and says, “Please, make yourself at home. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

“Wait,” Will manages to say before Hannibal leaves. When he’s met with a curious, expectant look, Will shies away, glancing at his feet and rubbing at his wrist.

“What is it, Will?”

There’s something about the way his name flows in Hannibal’s accent that makes Will shiver, and he swallows heavily before saying, “What’s wrong with me?”

“It is less what is wrong with you,” Hannibal says, and Will doesn’t look up to confirm, but he thinks he can hear a soft smile in the doctor’s voice, “than what is special about you. And you are very special, by my account. Soon, you will see. I will ensure that.”

Will can’t remember the last time he blushed, but he’s blushing so hard he can feel the heat radiating down his neck. He can’t bring himself to respond, instead watching Hannibal’s shoes as he turns and leaves Will alone in a strange room in a stranger’s home. Will reaches for his phone to text Beverly, but his pockets are all empty.

It doesn’t scare him as much as it should.

He stands still for another few minutes before moving to close the door and undress, leaving his boots and jeans strewn in a path to the en-suite bathroom, where he finally inspects the damage he did to himself. But there are no mirrors in the bathroom, so he must rely only on what he can see with careful manipulation of his aching body.

The splinters in his hands are mostly shallow this time, and thankfully, there are none still in the shaft of his cock, although there are a few nasty gouges in the tender flesh, where splinters may have threatened. The deep furrows at his side are still red, but the swelling has gone down, and all of his ink is intact. He wonders if it’s possible to remove a tattoo without cutting it out of his skin.

Turning on the shower and then realizing he wants a bath instead, Will sucks in a deep breath and holds it until his lungs burn. When he releases the air, he briefly imagines what Freddie Lounds would write if she could see him now. Would she still want him? Find him interesting? Sexy?

It’s a hopeless task, and when Will sinks into the steaming bath, he lets his mind go blank except for the vague sensation of being cooked alive.


	4. Pressure Points

It’s past noon when Will finally crawls out of the too-comfortable bed in Hannibal’s guest room. Better rested than he thinks he might have ever been, Will reaches his arms up in a long, hard stretch, making his joints crack and muscles cramp. When he relaxes, he feels like a jellyfish.

His legs tremble under him as he goes to his bag on the armchair beside the door. He slept naked, with the cool material of the sheets wicking away his sweat so effectively that now his t-shirt doesn’t stick on wet skin as he pulls it over his head. His hair is hopelessly tangled but curly enough after air drying that it looks almost intentional, so, laziness aside, he leaves it as is and reaches for the pair of loose black shorts he usually wears as pajamas.

Although he imagines Hannibal won’t approve, Will leaves his soiled jeans and boots where they are, tracking a chaotic path from bedroom door to bathroom door. He needs to ask about borrowing Hannibal’s washing machine, or at least some detergent, so he can clean the blood and sweat and come and general grime out of the black denim.

When he opens the bedroom door, he can hear a distant orchestra, reverberating through the house like a nostalgic dream. It shouldn’t catch on the hungry barbs inside him as much as it does, since he has no similar experiences to compare it to, but he’s tangled in before he can even think to do otherwise. The melody pulls him down the stairs, barefoot and silent except for where the stairs creak under his weight.

He follows the music to a large kitchen, distinctly modern in a way that sets it in opposition to the rest of the house that Will’s seen.

“Ah, good afternoon, Will,” Hannibal says, glancing up from where he stands at a gas range, skillet in hand. “Perfect timing. I’m just finishing lunch. Frittata with ham, spinach, and gruyère. I trust you slept well. How are you feeling?”

Will wraps his arms around himself, rubbing his elbows just to feel the bones under the thin skin, and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. There’s an intensely uncomfortable intimacy—or, he thinks, maybe domesticity is the more accurate description—about standing there, watching Hannibal cook for him. After a moment, he nods and says, “Better, I guess. But I always feel better the morning after.” He pauses, reaching up to scrub at the scruff on his cheek. “Well, not _better_. More normal. More myself.”

“I see,” Hannibal says as he pulls the skillet off the stove and carries it to the oven to his right. He checks his watch once he closes the oven door, turning on his heel and collecting a handful of fresh fruits from a bowl on the counter. “What does normal feel like?”

That’s harder than saying what his trances feel like. How does he describe normal? “I don’t know,” he mumbles with a half-shrug, “things just feel the way they should.” The look Hannibal gives him then is a skeptical one, and Will preempts him by saying, “Do you need help?”

Hannibal’s mouth is caught slightly open, and he closes it just long enough to smile before saying, “Have you ever prepared fruit salad?”

“No,” Will says quickly, a dark look pulling at his brow, “but I can probably manage.”

Gesturing him closer, Hannibal sets a small knife on the edge of a cutting board, with a few oranges and peaches gently rocking on the wood. “Start with these. I’ll pull the melon and berries from the refrigerator.”

The knife is heavier than it looks, and Will has to push away the sudden, intrusive image of carving himself open, flaying his hands until he can see the taut tendons under the skin. He swallows heavily, dragging the fingertips of his free hand across the grain of the wood cutting board, focusing on the tiny, smooth ridges until the desire to butcher himself is gone. When he’s mostly sure he’s in control again, Will begins with a soft peach.

He knows peaches, has visceral memories of eating them on stifling hot days in Louisiana, and their sweetness is inextricably tied to bitter memories of a cold father who stinks like twice-vomited booze and spoiled fish.

The blade of the knife wedges into a peach pit, and Will wonders if there’s enough cyanide in it to poison himself or Hannibal or anyone larger than a child. He’d never poison a child, he thinks, giggling under his breath, so quiet it’s just a bare stutter of air. But Hannibal seems to catch it and, as he carries an armful of whole cantaloupes and berry boxes to the counter, he says, “Something the matter?”

“Just thinking,” Will says, his shoulders tensing as he rocks the knife into the flesh of the peach, slicing it into neat sections and trying not to imagine the dripping juice as blood.

With a gentle thud, Hannibal leaves the cantaloupe beside the cutting board and produces a crystal serving bowl from seemingly nowhere. “Thinking gets you in trouble, Will, doesn’t it?” he asks casually, his accent smoother than Will remembers from last night. Will glances out the corner of his eye as Hannibal opens a box of strawberries and begins hulling them. He thinks he’s being surreptitious about it, but a moment later, Hannibal meets his eyes and raises a brow, saying, “Is thinking part of ‘normal’ for you?”

Biting his lip and trying to tamp down a pesky blush, Will says, “Yeah, but it’s the not thinking that gets me in trouble. It’s the trance.”

Hannibal hums appraisingly. “I’m not sure I agree. You seem to follow your instincts when you aren’t thinking—a trance, you’ve been calling it?—and it reduces the stress you put on yourself. Thinking tangles up your mind as you struggle to reconcile what your body wants and what you are or aren’t willing to do for it.”

“What my body wants is sick,” Will snaps, whacking the knife onto the cutting board with enough force that the wood grain leaves an impression on his sore knuckles. The sound of it seems to echo through the kitchen, and Will sighs, deflating slightly. “I don’t end up bloody and broken when I’m thinking. I don’t put my friends through hell when I’m thinking. Does thinking feel as good? No, of course not, but I’m an addict, and you can’t possibly suggest I just give in to an addiction.” Hannibal studies him carefully, his eyes dark and blank with practice, and Will wants to shrivel away as he says, “I’m sorry.”

He picks up the knife again to start on another peach, but Hannibal reaches out, wrapping Will’s hands in his larger, steadier ones, and takes the knife from him, setting it far out of reach. His voice is gentler than Will expects as he says, “Peel the oranges, please.”

It’s ridiculous, he thinks, that he’s being treated like an unruly, untrustworthy child, being chastised and punished. He’s a thirty-five year old man who hasn’t had a father in twenty of those very long years, and he definitely doesn’t need to be told what to do. Except the indignation is only skin deep, like tattoo ink or drumstick splinters, and when he does as he’s told, he feels better, even when the citrus juice seeps into his healing wounds and he sucks in a breath through clenched teeth.

“When is your next concert?” Hannibal asks a moment later as he slices the melon and adds it to the crystal bowl with the rest of the prepared fruits.

Will rips an orange in half, carefully peeling away the bitter pith, and says, “Wednesday. In Santa Ana.”

“Perfect,” Hannibal says. “Then we have time.”

Tossing a daring glare in the doctor’s direction, Will pouts and says, “Time for what?”

The smirk that pulls at Hannibal’s lips is enough to form a pit in Will’s gut that deepens as the man says, “Time to improve, naturally. I hope you didn’t believe it would happen overnight.”

“It does, sometimes,” Will says, his voice sharp as he collects up the orange segments in his bare hands and drops them into the bowl. “And I can’t stay, anyway. I need to get home tonight.”

Hannibal’s brow pulls, and Will starts to think he’s disappointed or something close to it, although the look is there and gone in a blink. “And why is that?” Hannibal asks, using a large wooden fork to mix the fruits together until the bowl is as colorful and beautiful as Will thinks any food could possibly be. As if on cue, his stomach gives a low grumble, and he looks away in embarrassment. Hannibal offers him a melon cube from the bowl, and when Will takes it, their fingers touch just long enough for him to remember the inescapable and intolerable arousal he’d felt the night before when their hands met.

He pops the fruit in his mouth and chews to avoid having to respond, but once he’s swallowed, Hannibal is still watching him, and Will feels compelled to say, “I have to see my dogs.”

“Where do you live?”

Will presses the pad of his thumb to his lips, sucking off the sticky sweet fruit juice that’s seeped into his fingerprint, and for good measure, he nips at the soft skin with his front teeth. Not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to leave a white pressure mark that takes a minute to fade.

He’s not sure why he’s so intent on hedging away from Hannibal’s questions, but he has to force himself to say, “Virginia. Wolf Trap.”

Hannibal nods and says, “Maybe an hour and a half, if there’s traffic. We have time.”

“So I can’t be fixed overnight, but you can fix me in a matter of hours?” Will frowns as he crosses his arms over his chest, ignoring the rest of the oranges. “I’m sorry, Dr. Lecter, but that seems a little over ambitious.”

“It rarely matters how much time one has,” Hannibal says with a confidence that rankles Will slightly, “as much as how well one spends that time.” He offers Will a tiny smile that might not be a smile at all. Will can’t quite tell, can’t say whether he’d prefer it if Hannibal was or wasn’t smiling at him.

Will bites his lip and says, “Can I help with anything else for lunch?”

Pushing the crystal bowl into his hands, Hannibal says, “Take this into the dining room, just there.” He gestures though the open doorway, and his voice is firm and steady as he continues. “Don’t drop it. I’d hate for you to waste our time on your knees, getting scraped up as you scrub the floors.”

A pang of arousal shoots through Will, and the bowl feels a hundred times heavier. The flush rising to his cheeks is painfully warm, his core clenches to cramping, and his heart rate spikes, buzzing in his chest like an insistent snare. He blinks a few times, trying to think of a response, but nothing comes. So he just ducks his head and carries the fruit into the dining room, not as carefully as he should, and he’s almost disappointed he makes it to the large table without incident.

***

He’s so underdressed it’s embarrassing. He’d be more comfortable completely naked, Will thinks. Except, of course, he wouldn’t, not with Hannibal sitting across from him, wearing a damn suit, perfectly tailored and elegant and expensive looking. Will’s gray t-shirt pulls across his shoulders—one of the few parts of his body that stays robust even when he forgets to eat or can’t eat or can’t keep food down when he does—and his soft shorts show too much where they pull across his groin and slide up to show the tattoos giving way to untouched skin above his knees.

There’s some consolation in the fact that he’s pulled his chair so close to the table that his body is squeezed between the furniture and mostly hidden from Hannibal, who carefully skewers a forkful of fancy egg and says, “Tell me about your role in the band.”

“I play the fucking drums.” Will stabs a strawberry, staring at Hannibal as he eats it. He’s fully aware that’s not what Hannibal meant, but he enjoys the way Hannibal’s jaw tightens, the way his eyes narrow just slightly. Part of him wants to wait until Hannibal has to clarify, but there’s a strange nagging at his gut that says he shouldn’t test him any more than he already has, so he swallows the fruit, shrugs, and says, “Right now I just do what they tell me to do.”

Hannibal eats his frittata—Will thinks it looks like an egg pizza, which also coincidentally sounds much less obnoxious—and hums once he swallows. “So you have no input in songwriting?”

It’s not as simple as that, but it would take a very long to explain fully, so Will just says, “No, I do. Sometimes. Usually they end up vetoing my best ideas. I’ve been promised we’ll use them once we’re more successful, but apparently they’re too risky at the moment.”

“Oh?”

“My style has been called avant-garde.” Too graphic, too brutal, although Will isn’t sure there is such a thing as too brutal in the world of metal. Until, maybe, you use a photo of a bandmate’s suicide as an album cover and wear shards of their skull as a necklace. That might be too brutal. He’s not quite there.

Yet, says the nagging voice in the back of his head, which he has to push back with an increasing amount of effort.

Hannibal raises a brow but doesn’t push, instead opting for another line of attack. “Do you enjoy when your bandmates reject your ideas?”

“No, of course not,” Will says immediately. At least that’s true.

There’s a moment of consideration in Hannibal’s eyes, and he takes his time in sipping a glass of red wine. It’s a little early for wine, Will thinks, but he’s got his own vices and is in no position to judge the vices of others. Especially not the vices of a very wealthy psychiatrist who could, as Price so helpfully pointed out, potentially be a serial killer. But Will thinks it’s unlikely.

“But you still enjoy playing the music that they create without you, to the point that you injure yourself. Is it the physical pain or the emotional pain that arouses you sexually?”

The blush is back, fast and hard, and Will wants to reach up and slap himself, but he’s suddenly self-conscious of his own perversions. He stammers over himself, beginning to rub at the soft spot of his wrist like he always does, and gives a dispassionate shrug. “Physical, I guess,” he finally says, although he’s not sure if he’s lying. Before Hannibal can say anything, Will quickly follows up with, “And it’s not that they never take my ideas—they do. I’ve written every drum part in every song, and sometimes Zeller even likes the lyrics I suggest. It’s just the creative bits they tell me to take out.”

“And the trance, as you called it, how exactly do you experience it?” Hannibal has no notepad, no tape recorder, not even a cell phone to keep track of everything Will’s saying, but he seems to carefully file everything away, and Will’s under the impression that the doctor will never forget.

Sighing, Will lets his silverware clatter onto his plate, and he pushes back from the table to rest his hands in his lap, where he can worry at his wrist without being seen. “I don’t know. I forget a lot of what happens when I’m there. What I do remember, it’s like watching a movie of myself. But everything feels more intense. Better. Like I could float off if there’s nothing to pin me down.”

It’s then that a vivid image of being pinned under Hannibal’s body fills Will’s mind, and he swallows back a gasp, pressing his hands into his groin to hold down a growing erection.

“I see,” Hannibal says, and Will can’t tell if he has any idea the kind of reaction he incites in Will. Underneath the clinical professionalism, Will thinks he can hear a low heat in Hannibal’s voice as he asks, “And can you achieve arousal or orgasm only when in physical pain?”

Will’s not sure. Although he gets aroused at damn near anything, it feels like, he can’t remember the last time he came without hurting. But to say that he can only get off when bruised and bleeding? It seems like an overstatement. Although, the further back he thinks, Will realizes it might be true. It’s not something he’s keen to admit, so instead he deflects, or attempts to, by saying, “That’s not exactly the kind of question people usually ask during lunch.”

A spark of amusement flashes across Hannibal’s eyes, and he smiles before he says, “You’re at lunch with an unusual man, Will.”

A response which, of course, does little to ease Will’s growing arousal. His first instinct is to dig his ragged, bitten fingernails into the underside of his wrist, but with Hannibal’s analysis still heavy in his mind, he restrains himself. It’s harder than he expects.

“I’ll wait to make a formal diagnosis until I can better observe your fugues,” Hannibal says, and it’s strangely comforting for Will to have a clinical name for the trances. Hannibal’s fingertip arcs across the foot of his wine glass in a slow rhythm, and Will’s foot begins tapping in time. “It’s clear that you’re a masochist, in one form or another. The question is whether your tendency toward a pain-pleasure merger constitutes a disorder.”

Will stares down at his scarred, scabbed hands, and feels something almost like shame balling in his core. His father used to call him a masochist, and as much as Will hates to admit that his father might have been right about anything, he can’t quite deny this.

“How can you tell if it’s a disorder?” he asks, voice cracking at the rise of the phrase.

When he glances up at Hannibal, the look that meets him is softer than he remembers, and the voice is similarly gentle. “The definition of a disorder is based on the definition of the status quo,” Hannibal says, “although the status quo can be different, dependent on who’s doing the defining.”

It’s a bunch of bullshit, Will’s quick to think. Either it’s a disorder or it’s not, either he’s crazy or he’s not. But these things come on a spectrum, he has to remind himself, although the grayness of the reality is less satisfying. Until, of course, he begins to think about it in terms of pain and pleasure, as if they form their own sort of spectrum. That, he understands too well, and it pushes him toward a different topic entirely.

“That woman who stopped me in the park, that was your…?”

Hannibal raises a brow, eating another forkful of frittata. “Bedelia?” The name rings a bell, and Will nods. “She’s a colleague. A very old friend. Some might say a confidante.”

“You know what she told me?” Will stabs two blueberries on the tines of his fork, pausing en route to his mouth to wave the fork in lazy circles and say, before Hannibal could answer, “She told me, if I didn’t behave now, I’d suffer later. What’s that about?”

The accusation in his voice hangs in the air over the table as he slides the blueberries into his mouth, all teeth scraping stainless steel, and his abs clench down around his guts when he reminds himself he shouldn’t be any more provocative than absolutely necessary. He’s about to apologize again, but Hannibal speaks before he can.

“It’s usually the truth, isn’t it?”

His lips quirk up into a wry smirk, and Will leans back in his seat, putting as much space between them as he can. Using the sharp points of his empty fork, Will scratches up the inside of his wrist, a new variation of a habitual tic. Hannibal would probably disapprove of him using the fork now as it’s meant to be used, but it’s fine. Will’s not hungry anymore. Or, at least, not hungry in any way food can fix.

So he just watches Hannibal eat, watches the way his lips close around a carefully loaded fork, the way his finger presses down the spine of his knife, the way his freshly shaven jaw seems to glisten as he chews. He thinks he’s being subtle, thinks he averts his eyes fast enough when Hannibal looks at him, but after a bite of peach and strawberry, Hannibal says, “You don’t have to hide from me, Will. I am perhaps the only person you need not try to fool.”

Dread, more of it than he thinks is reasonable, hits Will in the chest, dodging ribs and organs until it gets to the middle of him and explodes like a bomb. Staring at Hannibal, meeting those dark eyes across the table, Will doesn’t think he can look away no matter how much he wants to. But for once, he doesn’t really want to.

“I don’t know if I could fool you,” he says, and it’s the truth. The fork digs into the soft spot at the inside of his elbow, right at the bulge of his vein, but the gentle ache doesn’t radiate the way he wants it to. Swallowing back a thread of frustration, which triggers its own memory, Will says, “Where’s my phone? I need to call Bev. Or Jack. Let them know I’m alive.”

Hannibal’s smirk widens, and he dabs at his lips with the napkin from his lap. “Your treatment will be more effective if you commit yourself to it without the distractions of your daily life.”

Frowning, Will says, “Right, but can’t I just let them know I’m okay?”

“I’m happy to make the call on your behalf, Will,” Hannibal says, and suddenly the smirk is a smile, and Will can’t quite say if he ever saw a smirk at all. “You’re welcome to be there when I do, if you don’t trust me yet.”

“Why should I trust you?” Will’s voice is darker now, hoarse enough that it sounds closer to a growl, and he coughs a few times before saying, “Just let me call Bev.”

The fork at his arm slowly pierces the skin, just along a series of mindless, meaningless spirals that dance from elbow to wrist, and pearls of blood bead on top of the dark ink, pooling until gravity takes over and red streaks around the musculature of his forearm.

“Stop,” Hannibal says, except his lips don’t move, and the voice is nothing but a low, strangled whisper in Will’s ear. The sneer he gives Hannibal is a challenge, and he presses the fork deeper, until his flesh dimples around it, blood filling the craters left. The whisper is impossibly closer, almost hiding in his hair, winding into him, as it says, “I’ve told you once already, _ma sirène._ That is my responsibility. _”_

A strange compulsion has Will dragging the fork down his arm, without enough pressure to so much as scratch, and he’s transfixed as he watches his blood trace careful spirals down his arm, seeming at once to follow his body’s form and the shapes of his tattoos.

He swallows heavily and glares at Hannibal, whose blank stare and clenched jaw must be hiding so much that Will has no way of accessing. And he has the audacity to tell Will not to hide from him. “Fuck you and your mind games,” Will finally bites out, grip tightening around his fork. “I’ll do it myself.”

When Hannibal stands, with an eternal grace that Will is suddenly jealous of, setting his folded napkin on the table and pushing in his chair behind him, Will’s stomach drops. He’s gone too far this time, and he knows it. As Hannibal rounds the table and comes closer to him, Will tenses up and begins to apologize, but even that’s overwhelmed by the instinct to stand and meet an aggressor face-to-face. That’s bred into him, even if he’d rather avoid it, even if he never got the fighting skills to follow through.

His chair scrapes loudly against the floor as he stands, squaring up to Hannibal, who seems much larger now. “What are you doing?” Will asks, holding the fork close to his side, adjusting his grip on the handle until his thumb presses into the shallow bowl of its body.

Cocking his head just slightly to the side, Hannibal stops a step away from him and reaches his hand out, palm up. “Give it to me,” he says, and his lips move around the firm demand this time. The tension in his shoulders makes his calm tone more menacing, but Will’s not impressed. Or, rather, he is, and he _hates_ it.

“Make me.”

Maybe he sounds like a petulant child, and maybe he is. But what happens next is directly out of Will’s childhood, complete with the underlying knowledge that he’ll regret having said anything at all.

Hannibal moves faster than physics should allow, or at least that’s how it feels. Will stumbles back, nearly tripping over the leg of his chair in the process. He brandishes his fork as a weapon, dancing backward on the balls of his feet as Hannibal pushes forward. If he were in a trance—and he wishes he were—he’d see them from above, moving like fencers, a farcical demonstration with one of them a mere novice, the other a champion.

The dance comes to a jolting pause as Will’s back slams into the blue wall behind the table. He can’t breathe for a moment, keeping Hannibal at a distance with the blood-tipped fork, although it doesn’t seem to be holding him off.

“Stop it,” Hannibal says, darker than before but still mostly calm. Will can barely hear him over the rushing of blood in his ears, the heavy thrum of his pulse, his shallow breaths. The tinnitus blends in, just another instrument of his biology, while Hannibal’s voice is foreign, something to refuse.

So Will does refuse, and he lurches forward with a ferocity that surprises even himself, baring the fork with tines pointed down at Hannibal’s still-outstretched hand. The contact is ephemeral, with the man against him and then gone in a blink. Will can feel the heat of him at his back, and he whips around just in time to see Hannibal coming at him, wearing a look of flat indifference. Except, in his eyes, Will thinks he can see a terrible spark of interest, something close to hunger.

Blood smears across Will’s skin, and as he raises his arms to protect his face, stains mar the fabric of Hannibal’s suit jacket where it brushes against him. The sensation of rough wool against wounded skin sends Will closer to trance, and although he can almost predict the way Hannibal reaches out to grab his wrists and bind them together, he can’t quite prevent it. His body follows his mind’s commands, but with a faltering delay, leaving time for doubt, time for mistakes.

Hannibal presses his weight into Will as he holds his wrists together, and Will’s not ready for it. He goes down in a jumble of limbs that would be more graceful if he had simply fainted. The doctor goes with him, coming to straddle Will’s thighs. It’s a precise enough position to restrict Will’s instinctual flailing and kicking, and a side effect is that Will’s very noticeable erection rises in his thin shorts between them, just inches in front of Hannibal’s body.

All he can see is the too-bright lights overhead, giving Hannibal a golden halo. And as he glances down Hannibal’s body, he feels lightheaded, close to trance but not quite there. His hands don’t feel like they belong to him, going blue from lack of circulation where Hannibal’s got thumbs on his pressure points, and the silver of the fork glints maliciously, pointing up between them and perfectly aligned, from Will’s perspective, over his cock. A wet splotch darkens the material of his shorts, and Will feels his entire body going a hot red in embarrassment.

But Hannibal, staring down at him with an intensity that Will can’t describe, doesn’t seem like he’s expecting embarrassment.

“Let go,” Hannibal commands, trying to wrest the fork from Will’s clenched fists. Will’s not sure why he’s so intent on keeping it. Clearly the weapon isn’t much of a weapon in untrained hands, let alone against an apparent master. But he feels safer with it, when he can hide his arousal behind violence instead of attraction.

The thumbs at the soft points of his wrists press harder, shooting sparks of pain up his wrists and arms, so bright his vision clouds. Will’s hands release the fork of their own accord, and he’s left powerless but as hard as he was last night. Once Hannibal has the fork, he sets it on the floor and slides it far away, under the table, where Will can’t get to it again. He wants to thrust his hips up into Hannibal’s weight, but he just barely restrains himself, biting his lip to bleeding instead, until he needs to keep his mouth open to catch his breath.

“This is unacceptable behavior, Will,” Hannibal says, his voice steady and mild, and it arouses Will even more.

A tiny moan escapes him, and he lets his entire body go limp, lets Hannibal’s weight press him into the hard floor, and lets his mind start to wander off into his dreamland, where the pleasant haze takes the edge off everything except the delicious pain.

It’s a sharp slap across his scruffy cheek that brings him back, wide-eyed and panting, to stare up at Hannibal, whose frown is perfectly stern but lacking any anger.

“Again,” Will says, nothing more than a hoarse whisper, and when he repeats himself, he realizes he’s begging. “Again, please, again.” When the matching slap stings across his other cheek, Will gasps, and his cock twitches in his shorts. He wriggles under Hannibal, and he gets what he wants as Hannibal separates his hands and pins them to the floor beside Will’s head. With the doctor hovering over him, Will throws his head back hard enough the sound of his skull against the floor echoes through the dining room.

He comes with a shuddering cry as Hannibal shifts and his thigh brushes against Will’s erection. Will’s distantly aware it’s his second pair of pants soiled this way in as many days.

“Do you feel better?” Hannibal asks, something tighter in his tone, as a strand of hair falls from his gelled style and crosses his forehead. Will swallows a few times, not trusting his voice to work, and gives a weak nod. It must be enough, because Hannibal’s lips pull into a tiny, thin smile, barely more than a grimace, and he says, “Then I will consider it an effective treatment. One I am happy to administer as long as you are committed to your own improvement.”

Will’s mind is still foggy, but a few things are clear to him. One, that Hannibal is the most handsome, capable man he’s ever met. Two, that his life is in danger in Hannibal’s hands. Three, that Hannibal’s are the only hands that can help him. And four, that he’ll never come as hard or as fast—or perhaps even at all—with anyone other than Hannibal.

These realizations are at once comforting and terrifying, and Will finally manages to say, “Promise?”

Something crosses Hannibal’s eyes, like he didn’t expect that response, and when he speaks again, he massages a thumb across the inside of Will’s wrist. “It would be grossly negligent of your doctor to withhold your medicine.”

“Thank you, Hannibal,” Will says immediately, suddenly able to breathe deeper and freer than even moments before. He swallows back another moan and instead says, “Can I…” He pauses, glancing aside before building up the confidence to meet Hannibal’s eyes and search them. After darting his tongue out to wet his lips, Will says, trying to be as sultry as he ever has been, despite probably looking like a wild mess, “Can I make it up to you?”

Hannibal releases his hands, sitting back on his heels, although it takes none of the weight off Will’s legs. His frown is less certain for a moment, but his eyes steel as he rests his hands on his thighs and says, “No, that’s not necessary, Will.”

Rejection stings worse than slaps, worse than fork tines, worse than tattoo guns, worse than drumstick splinters, and all without the equal and opposite edge of pleasure. Will wants to shrivel up where he lays on the floor of Hannibal’s dining room, pinned under the doctor himself, the object of Will’s sudden obsession. But as much as his guts pull into themselves, his body remains, takes up as much space as ever, and Will’s blush is so hot that he thinks he might just as soon self immolate.

Fingers reach out to caress the side of Will’s neck, and the touch is gentle like a whisper, tapping along the length of his artery in time with his pulse. They trace the lines of a mermaid’s flowing hair, which once was made blond out of a careful mix of yellow and ochre inks, but has faded with time to a jaundiced tan. When Will can bring himself to glance up at Hannibal, what he finds is a pensive, careful blankness, and he imagines Hannibal can feel the vibrations of his voice as Will leans into the touch and says, “I’m sorry.”

Will is suddenly aware that his hands are free, and he uses the liberty to reach up and settle his fingers over Hannibal’s, without any pressure, just moving with him, mimicking.

“Don’t apologize,” Hannibal says, and Will frowns, beginning to think he’s done something wrong. More wrong than he already has, at least. But Hannibal gives a nearly imperceptible shake of his head, shifting that one stray strand of hair, and says, “It’s easy for me to satisfy your needs, but there are things I need that you cannot give me, Will. Don’t apologize for my indigence.”

Another apology comes easily to Will’s lips, but he bites it back, tracing his fingers up Hannibal’s wrist and onto the material of his jacket, up until he can’t reach any further. He almost can’t hear his own whisper under the ringing in his ears as he says, “But I want to.”

This time it’s Hannibal who looks away, apparently unable to bear the way Will’s eyes gleam with determination.

“Stop it,” he says, although this time the command carries less weight. “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”

That’s true, Will thinks. He doesn’t have a clue. And it should bother him more than it does, but for now, he feels like an instrument, like a dream, and it’s the most comfortable he’s been in a long time. A drowsy warmth is spreading through him, making his limbs too heavy, and he thinks he could use a nap. Maybe on the drive back to Wolf Trap. The thought of seeing his dogs only strengthens the soothing wave that rolls up his spine.

“Then tell me,” he says, savoring the rough texture of wool under his fingers. “What do you need?”

It’s the wrong thing to ask, because Hannibal starts to stand up, leaving Will cold and feeling like he might float away with nothing to anchor him. His pants feel sticky, and he needs another bath and to do a load of laundry, and all these mundanities distract him from watching the way Hannibal’s shoulders move, the way his jaw clenches, the way he steps over Will’s legs and goes back to the table, picking up the half-eaten frittata.

Letting his head roll to the side so that his burning cheek presses against the cool floor, Will tells himself that what he’s feeling is normal, valid, justifiable. It’s only a shame that he knows it’s a lie.

***

When Will finally manages to peel himself up off the floor of Hannibal’s dining room, he’s pretty sure he’s never felt as empty or embarrassed as he does now. He sits where he laid, knees pulled up to his chest and arms wrapped around his legs, smearing blood across the ink and hair on his calf. Resting his chin on his knee, Will stares blankly at the legs of the chair where he had been sitting just a matter of minutes ago. How can a few thin cuts of wood hold him up with ease, sturdy and immaculately crafted, when his own legs—millennia of blood and bone and sinew made for such things—can’t manage?

Just another failing to add to the list, he supposes.

Crawling to his feet, Will sighs, pulling the waistband of his shorts away from himself until the fabric unsticks itself from his crotch. Of course, he only has the shorts and his jeans from last night, and now both are dirty, covered in his own mess.

He finds Hannibal in the kitchen, standing over the sink and hand-washing their plates. Will sounds small when he asks, “Can I use your washing machine?”

Hannibal glances over his shoulder, his eyes in a shadow that hides the disdain Will knows must be in them. His voice is measured, carefully flat, as he says, “Of course. I’ll put a load in if you finish the dishes. What did you need washed?”

“All of my clothes,” Will says, glancing down at his own legs under him, thinking they look too pale under all the color and too skinny around all the drummer’s muscle. “It’s just what I was wearing last night, and this.” He gestures sheepishly to his shorts, and he swears he can feel the disgust in Hannibal’s gaze, although he won’t look up to confirm it. And yet, his cock still gives a feeble twitch, and Will palms himself, sticking the fabric of his shorts to himself again.

“Take them off, then. Unless you’d like to go into the wash, as well.” The humor in Hannibal’s voice feels unnecessarily cruel, and Will finally glares up at him, but the look on the doctor’s face is softer than he expects, and suddenly he’s not sure if there was any disdain or disgust at all. He decides, to preserve his own logic, that Hannibal is just very skilled at hiding himself, at making Will see what he wants.

Swallowing back a spark of anger, Will stares down at his feet again, where a dark outline of bones trace over the ones under the skin, and something almost like pride makes him hesitant to strip right there, in the kitchen, under Hannibal’s watchful eye.

He takes a deep breath, hooking his thumbs under the waistband of his shorts, and closes his eyes as he pushes them off his too-sharp hips. The cool air against his skin makes him shiver, and he pauses for a moment before pulling his shirt up over his head and letting it join the pile on the floor.

“Pick them up,” Hannibal says, and when Will blinks and looks at him, he’s reaching a hand out for the clothes.

Kneeling, Will does as he’s told, and as he stands up again, he covers his genitals with his free hand, although he knows that Hannibal’s had enough time to judge him, if that’s his intention. A low guilt curls in Will’s gut as he steps forward to give Hannibal his dirty clothes.

“And the rest?”

Will finds it hard to meet Hannibal’s eyes, so he looks at his lips instead, memorizing the soft curves of them, saying, “In the bedroom. On the floor.”

Clicking his tongue like a disappointed teacher, Hannibal folds the dirty clothes under his arm and says, “I hope you don’t leave your house as messy as you leave mine.” It’s a soft chiding, without any real heat, but Will feels ashamed anyway. “I’ll do the laundry while you finish the dishes. If you’re good—no hurting yourself, no destroying my property, no attitude—I’ll take you to Wolf Trap tonight.”

Will perks up immediately. The mere prospect of seeing his dogs motivates him more than anything, and he’d be willing to promise to never touch himself again if that’s what it takes. Of course, if he made such a promise, it would be a broken one. Maybe Hannibal knows this, because he doesn’t make any more demands, just gives Will a tense smile and leaves him alone in the kitchen.

Naked and slowly getting used to it, Will darts back to the dining room, falling to his knees and crawling under the table to retrieve the bloody fork. It’s a miracle, he thinks, that he doesn’t have a single desire to stab himself with it as he carries it to the sink and begins to wash it. The blood, diluted in a stream of fresh water, swirls around the drain before disappearing, and then Will is determined to forget it, to forget anything that isn’t in pursuit of a visit home. He focuses on the cool water against his skin, the sound of it hitting plates and silverware, the excitement building in his chest. And for a moment, that’s all he is.

It’s a method that works surprisingly well.


	5. Slipping

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEW CONTENT WARNING: mentions of abuse

It takes Will close to an hour to finish cleaning the dishes, although it’s mostly because he’s determined to do it right, without leaving a single water spot on the glasses or a single crumb glued to the plates or a single smudge on the silverware. He dries every piece by hand, setting them in neat rows on the counter, and when Hannibal returns to inspect his handiwork, he’s rewarded with a barely there smile, a tight-lipped praise, and a small reassurance.

“Well done, Will. We’ll leave within the hour.”

Pride bubbles up in Will’s chest, and he imagines this is how his dogs feel when he scratches behind their ears and tells them how good they are. And just like his dogs, most of whom are prone to a few yaps following a good scratch, he says, “Can you call Beverly?” Hannibal raises a warning eyebrow in his direction, and Will is quick to add, “Please?”

Hannibal looks him over once, and Will wants to shy away from the appraisal, but then the doctor says something Will doesn’t expect. “Does the stag have a name?”

Glancing down at his own stomach, Will sees the tattoo from an angle, warping the lines of the antlers, which spread up from the regal stag centered at his belly button. Between the antlers are a hundred other tiny designs, all fading into one carpet of color—uniform until closer inspection. The stag was Will’s first big piece, before he did most of his back, and the creature looks wise with its age, although a trail of hair rises from Will’s crotch up its long nose.

“No,” Will says, immediately beginning to think of names, “not yet.”

Hannibal hums in response and says, “Follow me, let’s make that call.”

He leads Will through the house to a dark study, which is decorated like something out of an old Victorian novel. There’s a real stag’s head mounted above a massive mahogany desk—Will wonders if it has a name, although he doesn’t bother to ask—and the leather of the chairs is oiled but beginning to crack. There’s no computer, just a black rotary telephone at the corner of the desk. A stale musk flavors the air, and Will asks, “You don’t use this room much, do you?”

“I used to use it more often,” Hannibal says as he sits behind the desk and reaches for the telephone receiver. “But I’ve been otherwise occupied for the past several years. Perhaps I should reconsider the decor. I think my tastes have changed in the meantime.”

Will’s not sure what to make of that, except perhaps that Hannibal has a different office elsewhere, but he sits in the chair across the desk. The feeling of his testicles against the leather is enough to make him uncomfortable, shifting his hips back and forth before he ends up sticking to the chair.

“What’s the number?”

Reciting Bev’s phone number is as easy as playing rudiments, but just in case, Will still has it tattooed along the side of his left index finger, although the numbers have faded to the point where sixes look like eights and eights look like blobs. He’s told her never to get a new number, or else he’ll have to black it out and go in with white ink over top, which will need much more touching up than he’s used to. Although needles against bone more often is a pleasant proposition.

The rotary phone ticks as Hannibal dials, and he raises the receiver to his ear. Will can just about hear the ringing across the line, until it cuts out, and then there’s only a faint fluctuation of sound, lost under the wave of tinnitus.

“Hello, Beverly. It’s Dr. Lecter,” Hannibal says, sounding perfectly professional despite the fact that Will is sitting across from him, completely naked. Skilled in wearing masks, Will reminds himself. “Yes, everything’s going well. Will wanted me to give you a call so you don’t worry.”

More unintelligible mumbles, which Will imagines might sound concerned or frustrated or tired. He hopes Bev got to sleep in like he did. He hopes she’s taking advantage of her time off.

“No, unfortunately he can’t come to the phone at the moment.” Will perks up, shooting Hannibal a baffled look, but what he gets in return is a curt shake of the head. A dismissal, Will thinks, trying not to be as irritated as his instinct insists. He crosses his arms over his chest, damn near pouting, and Hannibal says into the phone, “I’d be happy to pass on a message, if you like.”

Breathing a tiny, maybe undeserved sigh of relief, Will leans back in his chair, until his back feels like it’s going to stick, too. When Hannibal says goodbye to Beverly and returns the phone’s receiver to its cradle, Will asks, “What did she say?”

“I’m sure you’d like to know,” Hannibal says, standing and brushing his hands down the front of his jacket to smooth away the nonexistent wrinkles, “but that’s something you’ll have to earn.” He gives Will a smug smirk and gestures for him to stand, which he does, although with a repulsive peeling sound that makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end.

He trails after Hannibal, trying not to sound too pitiful as he says, “Please tell me. I already did everything you told me to do, what more can you expect?”

“You’re close to punishment, Will, and not the type you prefer.” Hannibal’s voice is carefully measured, light despite the implication. He doesn’t look back as he speaks, but Will feels the censure intimately, and he falters a few steps behind the doctor. “If you still want to make a visit home, I suggest not pushing for more than I’m willing to give.”

Will bites his lip, glancing down at the floor as he follows Hannibal through the hallway until they get to the guest room where he slept. Hannibal stops and turns to him, his gaze steady and too blank as he says, “Shower. You need it.”

Ducking into the room and waiting until he can hear Hannibal’s steps down the stairs, Will lets out a low sigh, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets until all he can see is a kaleidoscope of impossible fantasies.

***

When Will comes out of the bathroom with a towel slung around his hips and his hair dripping onto his shoulders, he immediately notices a small pile of immaculately folded clothes on his bed, which has been made with hospital corners in the fifteen minutes he let himself melt under the steaming water. He suddenly begins to worry that he might be in trouble, that his failure to make his own bed might keep him from seeing his dogs.

Anxiety is easy for him, and it simmers in his gut as he dresses in his black jeans, pulling the same gray t-shirt from lunch over his sopping curls. His stubble is close to a beard, and Will regrets not having packed a shaver in his bag. But there’s one in Wolf Trap, if he ever manages to get there.

Sitting on the edge of the bed and bending over to lace up his boots, Will starts to worry that his dogs won’t recognize his scent. That shifts into the nervousness that his pack will think he’s dead, think he’s left them for good. Soon, Will’s afraid not all of his beloved strays will have survived to see him return. He can’t fathom the possibility that any might die thinking they were unloved or forgotten. He feels sick to even consider it and worse that it was his selfishness—his desire to go on a tour with the band, and now his decision to stay with Hannibal—that makes such a sequence of fears possible.

Elbows resting on his knees, he’s worrying the inside of his right wrist with the sharp edge of a lace’s aglet, scratching into a faded tattoo with all the precision of a wrong-handed signature. It’s not enough to arouse him or even tickle anything more than his empty dread, but it’s a habit, and he doesn’t think it’ll die until he does.

Pressing the plastic deeper into the soft side of his wrist, Will has to remind himself that he’s not allowed to do this anymore, no matter how much he needs it. Hannibal made that much clear with the fork, and Will doesn’t think the doctor will care much whether it’s a habit or not. It was a command, Will tells himself as he gets one last good gouge in. Sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth, he tries to push away the dense ball of horror that’s growing in his gut like a black hole. It keeps him from scratching for a moment, just long enough for his mind to drift back to his dogs, his home. And then he’s scratching again before he knows it, leaving shaky red lines that bloom under his ink.

“Will.”

Jerking up so quickly he goes lightheaded and dizzy, Will’s panic bubbles up, and he’s already crying as he begins to ramble, stopping every few pleas to suck in a pitiful sniffle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Please, Hannibal. I’m sorry. I just want to see them. I’m trying to stop. I promise. I’m sorry.”

Before he can apologize again, which is exactly his intention, the whisper creeps into his ear and says, “Be quiet, _ma sirène_.”

It just makes him cry harder, curling into a trembling pile on the bed, destroying the neat tension of the bedspread, pressing wrinkles into the linens underneath. Convinced he’s made some unforgivable mistake—hurting himself, begging for mercy, speaking too much, existing the wrong way—Will spirals into a different kind of trance, one where he feels everything too much. One where the ringing in his ears is too quiet, where he can hear his own stuttering breaths as he heaves between wailing sobs. One where the scratches at his wrist and the puncture wounds at his other arm and the healing scabs at his hands are all too itchy, not pleasant in the slightest. One where the world is coming down around him, trapping him in without his consent, without any hope of return.

His chest hurts, he doesn’t think he can breathe. Somewhere, through all the noise, he can hear water rushing, an ocean in his head.

Strong arms wrap around him, one under his knees and the other under his shoulders, and Will presses his nose into the crook of Hannibal’s neck as he’s lifted up. His face is too hot against the material of Hannibal’s shirt collar, and he focuses on the wet splotches where his eyes were, detailed down to the arc of his eyelashes. It doesn’t stop the tears from coming, but he consciously tries to stop moving, stop being more of a burden on Hannibal than necessary. All heis, all he should be, he thinks, is dead weight.

Hannibal carries him down the stairs, which Will can hear creaking as if they were his own bones. He doesn’t know where to expect Hannibal to take him, but he certainly doesn’t expect to be carried out to the car that he came in only earlier that morning.

He’s being disposed of. He’s too much trouble. Hannibal doesn’t want to bother with him anymore. He’s beyond helping.

“I need you to stand,” Hannibal murmurs, too calm to be trusted, and as he sets Will down, Will’s legs fail under him almost immediately. He goes down like a dropped puppet, trying to breathe through his tightening throat as Hannibal opens the car door. Yet another failure. Yet another reason for punishment. Yet another reason he’s better off dead.

Hannibal scoops him up again with a tiny grunt that makes Will even more guilty for his size, for the space he occupies, and when he’s gently laid across the back seat of the car, he’s terrified his tears will stain the leather, destroying Hannibal’s property, giving him another reason to hate Will.

“I’ll be right back. Breathe. Be here when I get back.”

As Hannibal closes the door and disappears, Will thinks he can manage that last part, at least. He’s not going anywhere. He couldn't if he wanted to. Trying to latch on to his singular success, Will is suddenly so exhausted he can’t bear to keep his eyes open long enough to keep crying.

He’s asleep before Hannibal gets back.

***

_Bayou murk, too thick to breathe, too dirty to see through. Rancid, stagnant, he floats with his back bobbing above the surface, facedown with mosquito larvae wriggling in his curls. Duckweed and moss catch on his skin, but he can’t reach up to scratch away the irritation._

_Under him, an alligator swishes past, barely moving the water between them, and then a gray, slimy catfish follows not far behind. It pauses to stare him in the face, eyes blank and soulless, whiskers like alien tentacles disappearing into clouds of dirt. Paralyzed, he can’t look away from it, can’t stop seeing his own blank and soulless eyes in the reflection of the catfish’s. Its voice is Jack’s as it says, garbled by the weight of the water, “Behind you.”_

_He can’t turn to look, can’t even splash around to kick up enough mud to obscure himself from the world._

_The catfish sinks down, disappearing between the sprawling roots of a cypress, and he floats like a bloated corpse at the whims of exiguous currents. In a lifetime, he’s never moved more than a few feet._

***

Thankfully, it’s dark when Will blinks awake, his eyes crusty and swollen and too heavy. The steady hum of an idling engine under him is a sort of lullaby, coaxing him to drift away again, but curiosity gets the best of him. Struggling to sit up, Will wipes his eyes, wincing against the sharp edge of a crystallized tear.

Hannibal isn’t in the driver’s seat, but Will can see the glow of a flickering neon sign through his blurry vision. It clears after a bit more rubbing, and Will instantly recognizes where he is.

Wolf Trap, in the closest thing to a downtown they have, just off the state route. Will doesn’t know whether to be thrilled or suspicious, although he can’t help the low excitement that he’s closer to home than he has been in weeks. Less than three miles, maybe five minutes by the backroads Will prefers, a bit longer on the roads with traffic and lights.

He leans against the window, carefully studying the strip mall he’s passed a hundred times. Will didn’t expect Hannibal to stoop to the level of a Walmart. With a huffing laugh that loosens up his chest, he tries to imagine the doctor strolling the wide aisles, his hair washed gray by too-bright overheads. Will considers what Hannibal might shop for. Does he go straight for the fresh produce? Ice cream? The bakery or the deli? Maybe he ignores the groceries and spends his time in the electronics department. That’s maybe the most unlikely, Will thinks. He can’t remember seeing a single screen in Hannibal’s house. Nothing more complex than a rotary phone and a state of the art brushed steel refrigerator.

Although, he’s not much different himself, with the notable exception of his cell phone, which was one of Jack’s requirements and turned out to be more useful than Will expected.

Hannibal emerges from the sliding doors, backlit or haloed by the terrible coldness of fluorescents, carrying a flimsy plastic bag in each hand. From this distance, Will can’t read the expression on his face, although, he reminds himself with a bitter edge, he rarely can, even if Hannibal is close enough to touch.

His knee starts bouncing, his breath fogging up the window, and Will slowly remembers the sheer terror before he passed out. It feels silly now, completely unjustified and melodramatic. Shame makes him blush before Hannibal even gets back to the car, which sits under a street lamp at the far end of the parking lot, away from nearly everyone. One car is close, just two spaces away catty-corner. Its black paint reflects the light in every direction, and its tinted windows are too dark to see past, but its fog lights are on, and Will thinks he can see the faint glow of a phone screen from inside.

Will tries to look otherwise occupied by tracing along the lines of the tattoos on his arms as Hannibal unlocks and opens the driver side door, sliding into his seat and setting the plastic bags on the passenger seat.

Glancing into the backseat, Hannibal says, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes. Thank you,” Will says, his voice cracking and still hoarse from his sobbing. Clearing his throat, Will wraps his arms around himself and says, “I’m sorry about earlier.”

Hannibal shifts the car into drive and pulls out of the space, navigating through the parking lot as he says, “Have you ever had a panic attack before, Will?”

Will stares at the black car as they leave, frowning as it also starts to move, seeming to follow after them at a distance. He bites his lip and forces himself to ignore it, lest paranoia set him off again. Shaking his head, he tries to comb through his spotty, hazy memory, but he can’t find anything as intense as what he felt that afternoon. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Do you know what, if anything, triggered it?” Will doesn’t respond, mostly out of fear that admitting to the fact he didn’t trust Hannibal to bring him home would only cause more trouble. As they pull out onto the main road, Hannibal changes tack. “You’ll have to give directions.”

That’s something Will can do. He guides them down the well lit roads, the ones with traffic and lights, before the backroads are the only option. His house is isolated, down a long, winding drive, and hidden from the road by trees and tall underbrush. It’s easy to miss if he’s not there to point it out. But Hannibal listens carefully and doesn’t overshoot a single turn, and soon they’re coming up on his little house.

Barking breaks through the sound of tires against gravel, and Will heaves a sigh of relief, throwing open the car door before they come to a stop and stumbling as he runs toward the front door, which is lit only by the headlights of Hannibal’s car.

The door comes open easily, and he supposes he must have forgotten to lock it—and it’s a good thing, anyway, Will realizes, because he doesn’t know exactly where the key is. He manages to take half a step inside before he’s bowled over by a whole pack of ragtag strays. Warm tongues lap at his face and arms, savoring the salt on his skin, and snuffling breaths spread across his ears and neck. Fur tickles his bare skin, and paws step on him to get closer.

He’s giggling, trying to pet everyone, trying to push away the residual stress of the past day, when he hears the porch steps creak behind him. A moment later, the lights flicker on, bathing the interior in a warm glow.

Winston perks up, pausing in his joyful reunion to look at Hannibal, who’s carrying the plastic Walmart bags in one hand and a small duffle bag in the other. The mottled dog’s head cocks to the side, tongue lolling out of his mouth, and Will holds Zoe close to his chest as he sits up. As soon as the little blonde dog sees the stranger, she begins yapping, thrashing in Will’s arms until he has to set her down. Still barking, Zoe runs up to Hannibal and nips at the leg of his trousers, snarling and pulling at the material with her underbite until Will’s worried it’ll rip.

“Stop! Bad dog,” Will says, trying to push away the rest of the strays, all of whom would apparently rather suffocate him, long enough to stand up and retrieve his misbehaving pet.

But Hannibal only raises a brow, bending down to set down his bags and pick Zoe up before she can do any real damage to his clothes. She’s still barking, but Will can tell she’s tiring herself out, because she doesn’t squirm in his arms as much as she probably wants to. “Hello there,” Hannibal says, holding Zoe out so they’re eye to eye. Suddenly she’s quiet, except for her usual short-nosed grunting breaths. Hannibal smiles at her, and Will’s caught by the way his eyes seem to twinkle. “That’s more like it, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Will says, scrubbing at his stubble that’s really more of a beard now. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”

When Hannibal sets Zoe down on the ground, she runs off to hide behind one of the large dog beds in front of the fireplace, and the rest of the pack seem to watch her go, considering among themselves before following. Will deflates slightly as even Winston trots off before Will can get his fill of unconditional, smelly love. Before he can sink into a pit of self pity, he puts himself to work, going to the kitchen to start preparing the pack’s food as Hannibal picks up his bags and sets them in one of the many hodgepodge armchairs around the living room.

“Shit,” Will murmurs when he finds his bag of kibble almost empty.

With a sharp sigh, he tells himself to reach out to the dog sitter Jack hired for him and remind them to follow the directions he’s left behind. That bag should’ve lasted at least through the end of the tour, but now it looks like he’ll have to buy another before he leaves, and it’s just one more thing to add to the list. But his memory is spotty, and it would help, he thinks sourly, if he had his cell phone. Instead, he scrounges around in a drawer for a pen and a pad of paper, and he writes himself an old-fashioned note.

“Is something the matter?” Hannibal asks over his shoulder from where he stands at a table in front of the window, studying the fishing lure Will left in a vice.

Shaking his head, Will says, “No, it’s fine.” Then, to his great satisfaction, when he rustles the bag to scoop out the food at the bottom, all the dogs’ ears prick up, and as it hits their steel bowls, they all come running to crowd around Will’s legs.

He flinches and giggles as a cold, snuffling nose presses against his knee through the rip in his jeans. Carrying the first two bowls over his head to avoid the larger dogs jumping up on him, Will pushes through the pack to the corner of the kitchen that’s dedicated to his dogs. He sets the bowls on the floor and just barely manages to escape before soft, whiskered muzzles swarm. The next two bowls follow, and Will does a careful rearranging act, nudging the bigger dogs to one and the smaller ones to another until everyone has a chance to eat.

Refilling the water bowls is quick work, although cleaning up the messy splashes later won’t be, and soon Will is washing his hands, taking care to soap his healing wounds. As much as the promise of infection entices him, he’s not completely a slave to his pain yet, and it’d be bad practice to force the band to cancel the rest of the tour just because he came down with a self-inflicted staph.

“Are you hungry?” Hannibal asks, coming up behind him quiet enough that Will jumps. A heavy hand settles between his shoulder blades, and it’s a strangely comforting pressure.

Shaking his hands over the sink, Will shrugs and says, “Not really. You’re welcome to whatever’s here. There’s not much.”

That’s the understatement of the century, it turns out, because when Hannibal opens the door to the old Frigidaire, it contains exactly two food items: an ancient box of baking soda and a half-eaten can of Spam. Will doesn’t really remember opening it. Besides that, there’s a plastic tub of dark dirt that used to hold live night crawlers but is probably now full of limp corpses.

For once, Hannibal’s not able to completely hide his grimace, and he quickly turns to the cupboards, which are slightly more promising but likely not anything close to what he’s used to. Will takes a guilty pleasure in imagining Hannibal on a camping trip, eating jerkies and cheese from a can. He probably wouldn’t make it.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Hannibal says, pulling a years-old bag of spaghetti from the back of a shelf.

Too embarrassed to watch what other stale and cobwebbed foodstuffs come out of his cupboard, Will ducks his head and steps around the happy mess of dogs, saying, “I’m going to shower again. Change. So, uh,” he pauses, realizing how unusual this is for him to say, “make yourself at home.”

***

Freshly showered, shaved, and dressed in a pair of old flannel pajama pants and a baggy, vintage Metallica t-shirt soft from hundreds of washings, Will returns to his kitchen feeling cleaner and more himself than he has in a very long time. He’s met with the mouth-watering scent of good food, which is nothing short of a miracle, and an image that sears itself into his mind.

Hannibal’s taken off his suit jacket, so it’s just his dress shirt underneath, and he’s rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, showing off his muscled forearms. His waist looks narrower without the jacket, and his shoulders somehow broader, and Will can’t help but stare. Surrounded by begging dogs that would love nothing more than to jostle free a forbidden treat, Hannibal’s tossing a red sauce into glistening spaghetti and managing to keep his shirt pristine in the process.

Will’s completely entranced, frozen in place with his mouth slightly agape, and he can’t even snap himself together when Hannibal looks up to him and says, “I hope you’ve found your appetite, Will. I’ve certainly made enough for the both of us.”

His dark eyes glint in the yellow light of the incandescent bulbs Will can’t bring himself to replace, and now he has even less reason to do so. He’s never been more struck by beauty—except, he thinks belatedly, perhaps the music he’s dedicated his life to, although it seems to fade away in the wake of his current awe.

When Will doesn’t respond—can’t, for the way his throat tightens up, the way his tongue feels too big for his mouth—Hannibal offers a smile, toothy for the first time Will can remember. It reveals a distinct pair of incisors, just slightly larger than Will thinks is normal, and it somehow makes Hannibal look even more dangerous, even sexier. Suddenly Will is imagining being eaten alive, his flesh ripped from his bones by those too-sharp teeth as he watches on. His blush burns hot, and he feels dirty again, like he needs another shower just to wash the thoughts away.

“Come, set the table,” Hannibal says, gentle but firm, and the command is the only thing that breaks him out of his own head. He ducks his head and joins Hannibal in the kitchen, simultaneously trying to brush past him at every chance and avoid his touch. He pulls a stack of mismatched plates from a cabinet.

The kitchen table has never been set for more than one, Will realizes as he lays out an unpracticed setting, with the forks and knives on the wrong sides, and he clears his throat to say, “I’d offer you something to drink, but there’s only water.”

Hannibal carries a large dish of pasta to the table and sets it as a centerpiece, saying, “Do you know how much of the human body is molecular water?” He doesn’t, and Will says so as he goes to fill two glasses from the tap. When he sits at the table across from Hannibal, the doctor says, “More than half. We are a species of chronic dehydration, chronic thirst. Perhaps water is boring, but more people should drink more of it.” Will’s not sure how to respond, and after a moment, Hannibal has mercy on him. “When you perform, you sweat your water out faster than you can replenish. I wonder if this dehydration contributes to your trances.”

“So the cure is drinking more water? Not,” Will pauses to rub his hands against the denim of his pants, and he wants to say death, but instead he says, “sleep?”

Beginning to serve their dinner, Hannibal says, “It’s only a possibility. Perhaps one worth further exploration.” Will hums, and Hannibal changes the topic entirely by saying, “Spaghetti with a modified pork bolognese.”

“Spam?”

Hannibal smiles. “Yes, Spam. Not ideal, but surprisingly flavorful.”

Will tries to school his grin as he picks up his fork and spins it in his portion of pasta. He glances up, waiting for Hannibal to take the first bite, but the doctor is watching him just as intently, and when Hannibal gives him a permissive nod, Will raises his fork to his lips and slurps up a loose noodle. It’s nothing short of a miracle how delicious the meal is, and Will doesn’t hesitate to say, “It’s delicious. Thank you.”

The first few minutes of their dinner is silent except for the sounds of begging dogs and quiet chewing. Will stops eating first, with half a plate of pasta left, as his gut starts to cramp against the saltiness, against the weight of too much food in his small stomach. He hasn’t put away this much in a long time, and he’s careful to stop now, before he has trouble keeping it all down. Swallowing down a gulp of water, Will briefly wonders how difficult it would be to breathe in the liquid by mistake, accidentally drown himself in effort to save himself.

Then he wonders if he can breathe in so much water his lungs will pop, fill his insides to the brim, make himself much more than half water. Hannibal’s voice jolts him out of the downward spiral as he says, “Although this isn’t pleasant dinner time conversation, I believe it’s necessary to address the issue of Ms. Lounds.”

“What?” Will frowns as he stabs a piece of seared Spam. “What about her?”

In truth, he’s nearly forgotten about her. He’s spoken to her all of once, seen her only once more than that, and although she seemed interested in him, Will hasn’t put much stock in it. All he knows of her is that wild mane of red hair and the aggressive red skirt suit she wore at their interview. And then, of course, the interview itself, which was like pulling teeth in the least pleasant way Will can imagine. That ridiculous question comes back to him then, and he cringes as he remembers his response. Kraken, he thinks, what complete bullshit.

But Hannibal’s expression is serious, and he says, “She’s followed us here, despite my best efforts to evade her.”

Will doesn’t know how to react to that at first, until a low grade paranoia circles around his stomach and makes him feel like he’s about to be sick. What if she’s seen them together? What will she think? Then Will realizes he won’t have to wait long to find out, if she ends up publishing something about him in her magazine. He takes another desperate gulp of water, trying to keep his pulse from skyrocketing, and when he swallows, he begins to rub at his wrist and says, “What happens now?”

“I suppose that depends on Ms. Lounds’s journalistic integrity,” Hannibal says, not sounding half as concerned as Will feels. Maybe it’s for Will’s benefit, to keep him from indulging his own fears, but to Will, it feels like a dismissal. But before he can lash out, Hannibal sets his utensils down with a metallic clink and says, “She would be foolish to come to here. There’s no crowd for her to hide in.” Will doesn’t think that hair could hide in any crowd. “We’re likely safe on your property, although this does mean that as soon as we leave, we must be careful not to show her anything we might not want published to the world.”

Still rubbing at his wrist, Will says, “How does she know?”

The question goes unanswered, and the meal is as good as over. All the dogs have given up on getting scraps, and they’re all curled up on the beds in front of the fireplace. Will wishes he could be so relaxed, so comfortable in his own existence.

Sighing heavily, Will says, “We can’t stay here forever, can we?”

“Not unless you want to miss your next concert.” Hannibal stands, carrying the leftover pasta to the refrigerator. Over his shoulder, he says, “We’ll have to return to Baltimore in the morning, anyway.”

Will frowns. “Why?”

“I have a meeting with Bedelia.”

Something very close to jealousy sparks in Will, and he crosses his arms over his chest, glaring at his plate before Hannibal takes it away, and all he can glare at is the battered surface of his kitchen table. “Is she your patient, too?”

Hannibal’s voice is flat as he says, “Not exactly. In fact, the other way around.”

“So _she’s_ able to give you what you need?” Will speaks before he can think better of it, and as soon as he does, he regrets it. Hannibal comes up beside him and takes his clean-shaven jaw in his hand, lifting Will’s head until he can’t hide from hard, dark eyes. “I’m sorry,” Will murmurs then, but it’s not enough.

Holding his chin so tightly Will thinks it’ll bruise, now without his stubble to hide the marks, Hannibal says, “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, Will. It will get you killed.”

Swallowing heavily, Will tries to nod, and once Hannibal releases him, he reaches up to massage the tender points at his jaw. He takes a moment to collect himself, staring down into his lap and absently tracing over the lines of his tattoos. He wants a new one. Wants the familiar bite of a tattoo gun at his flesh. Wants to feel something he can explain in no uncertain terms.

Once he finally stands and carries their glasses to the sink, Will says, “You can take the bedroom. I’ll stay on the couch.”

Hannibal looks like he’s about to say something, but nothing comes, and Will considers it a victory.

***

It’s nearly midnight by the time Will curls up on his couch and Hannibal takes his duffle bag to the bedroom, leaving the Walmart bags behind. Staring at the doorway to the bedroom, Will tries to gauge whether the doctor is going to come back out, or if he can snoop in peace.

After ten minutes of careful breathing, rubbing at his knee through the worn flannel of his pajamas, Will decides to take the risk. He moves quickly, pawing through the plastic bags. He’s trying to be quiet, but the dogs still perk up, and Winston even stares at Will, looking more human than he should. Raising a finger to his lips, Will shushes and whispers, “It’s okay, boy. Go back to bed.”

Winston looks unconvinced, but he lays back down again, still staring up at Will with a twitching of his eyebrows. Will can’t help but fawn at the impossible cuteness, at least for a moment. Turning back to the bags, Will takes stock of what all Hannibal bought.

His stomach drops.

There’s a bound length of natural rope, fifty feet of it, and two rolls of silver duct tape. A folded blue tarp, a box of long reach matches, and a utility knife whose packaging claims it’ll hold its edge longer than any competitor. And then, among the most threatening basket Will can imagine a cashier has ever seen—although he’s heard Walmart sees all types—is something so laughably mundane that Will feels like he might vomit. Two things, really: a camping guide, and a box of oatmeal raisin granola bars.

He stares at the bags, unsure what to make of it or what to make of the shiver it sends down his spine, until he hears the telltale creaking of the floorboards in his bedroom.

Jumping into action, Will rearranges everything exactly as he found it, or as close to it as he can remember, and nearly throws himself off the couch as he pulls his t-shirt over his head, getting caught around his curls. Once he finally tears it off, his heart racing so fast he can’t even hear Winston’s low whine, Will sees Hannibal standing in the threshold, wearing a curious look and a set of dark blue pajamas, piped in white.

Will swallows as he watches Hannibal’s eyes trace up and down his body, lingering on his bare, ink-mottled chest. Meeting his eyes again, Hannibal says, “Goodnight, Will. Sleep well.”

“I’ll try,” Will manages to bite out as Hannibal approaches him. His breaths are shallow, his heart thrumming against his ribs, his tinnitus swelling to fill his consciousness. Hannibal pauses in front of him, gives him an appraising once over, and then pushes past him to retrieve the two plastic bags. But thankfully, he doesn’t comment further, just turns and returns to Will’s bedroom. As he pulls off his pajama pants, Will is happy to watch him go.

***

By two in the morning, Will has come to accept that he won’t be able to sleep at all tonight. Not that he doesn’t want to. But his mind just won’t stop hearing the ticking of a clock, which is in perfect rhythm for half the minute and stutters for the other. Won’t stop hearing his snoring dogs, his own deep breaths, the frogs and crickets outside.

All the sounds could become a drone to lull him to sleep, Will thinks, if he weren’t also bombarded by images he’d rather ignore.

He can’t help but picture how Hannibal looked in the kitchen, focused and so delicious Will could have resorted to cannibalism. With his sleeves rolled up and his suit jacket abandoned, with his hands moving so expertly, with his body taking up all the space he needs. He owns that space, it’s his to manipulate as he wants. And Will can’t help but imagine himself under those hands, being molded to the shape of a perfect man. Being broken apart and reformed and enjoying every twisted moment of it.

His cock is hard in his boxers—he can’t remember being this consistently horny since he was a teenager—and he palms himself through his underwear. His legs want to splay out but they’re trapped by the back of the couch, and Will is starting to regret giving up the comfort of his bed.

It’s always an option, something deep in the back of his mind reminds him, to go slip into bed beside Hannibal.

Will wants it, but he won’t let himself even consider the possibility for more than the first fleeting moment it occurs to him, because he knows himself, and he knows that he won’t be able to sleep any better laying next to the man that excites him in the way no one else has in…maybe his entire life. That realization hits him hard, and he sits up on the couch, sighing and letting his head fall into his hands.

There’s no use in letting his mind run around in circles, doing nothing productive except sending him closer to another spiral of anxiety. So he swings his legs off the edge of the couch, and the cold floor under his feet tries to guide him to his bedroom. Winston lazily opens one eye, staring at Will just long enough to ensure that all is right with the world—at least in the eyes of a dog—before going back to sleep.

Standing and ignoring all the aches that shoot through his body—stiff joints, bruised muscles, stretching scabs—Will pads over to the long table in front of the window that overlooks the porch. He left a lure in the vise before he took off to meet the rest of the band in D.C., and he remembers being irritated he didn’t have enough time to finish the thread wrapping. Kneeling to get at eye-level with the work in progress, Will grabs his spool of thread and quickly falls back into the easy rhythm of unwinding a length, wrapping it around the lure’s body, and securing it with a careful knot near the tail. His thread is silver-flecked to catch the light, although he doesn’t suppose it’ll matter much if he takes it out now.

The full moon is bright through the window, and Will works by its glow alone, and soon he has a new lure to test and exactly zero incentive to wait to test it.

He grabs a rod from beside the door, also left in a rush, and leaves without so much as a pair of shoes. It’s a bad habit of leaving the door open behind him, and not one he second guesses until he’s halfway to the river, when he remembers what Hannibal said about Freddie. But he’s right, it’d be stupid for her to waltz into his home in the middle of the night, knowing Hannibal is still there.

Somehow it feels natural to leave his property in Hannibal’s protection.

Will’s humming by the time he wades into the water, stepping on the river rocks at the bottom and somehow avoiding the critters, as if by some sixth sense he can’t explain. He deftly ties his new lure to his line, and he casts out so effortlessly that it might as well be what he’s made for. If the band were to ever disappear, if music were to ever fail him—although the mere thought of it sends a sharp shiver down his back—there’s always the water. He can always be a fisherman like his father.

There aren’t many fond memories Will has with his father. Most involve humiliation or degradation, although he can still feel the sharp, physical stings of others. The only memories Will has, really, are the ones soaked in booze or the ones soaked in brine. Sometimes both. But some of the memories escape Will’s constant attempts at suppression, and those ones always include fishing.

His father took him fishing for the first time when he was two years old. He doesn’t remember that outing, of course, but he remembers the ones starting when he was about six. Going fishing with his father was the only time Will ever felt helpful, appreciated, wanted.

It must say something about him and his psychology, he thinks, that he still holds fishing so dear, even after he’s come to terms, mostly, with his father’s abuse. Or, more often, neglect.

Nothing’s biting, and Will reels in just to cast out again. He’s getting cold, even in the summer night, and he wishes he had taken the time to pull on his waders. But there’s something refreshing about the currents against the bare skin of his legs, splashing up his stomach and back, and soon, in the natural push and pull of fishing, Will starts to hum a new song. These are the times when his creative energy is strongest, most focused.

“Give me power,” he starts to sing, his voice shaking in the breeze, “give me pain.” He’s not even aware of what he’s saying. “Let it come, like blood through my veins.” He feels a tug at his line, and he jerks his rod up to set the hook before reeling in, still singing, “Break me, eat me, feel me, defeat me.”

The weight at his line is too light, and as he pulls his lure out of the water, all he’s got is a knotted mess of grass, devoid of a fish or anything else that might have made his efforts worthwhile. That, and a dull itch at his knuckles, where black scabs are beginning to form and pull at his tender skin. He shouldn’t be getting fresh tattoos wet like this, especially not in river water with all its microscopic creatures and dangers. But he doesn’t care enough to stop, and the low thrill of infection lingers in the back of his mind like always.

Pulling the detritus from his hook, Will sighs and casts out again, quiet now to focus on the rhythms of the nature around him. All the ideas he pitches to the band come from nature, and although most of them get rejected or tabled for a later album, Will appreciates all of them. They settle into his body like the biological cadences he can’t escape, and sometimes he thinks they become a part of him.

He never remembers where exactly he goes during his trances, but he’d like to think he comes here.

The moon ticks overhead, and by three in the morning, Will has been unsuccessful by every measure except, perhaps, a number of new melodies that he’s bound to forget before Hannibal gives his phone back so he can record them.

Casting out one last time—or, that’s what he tells himself, although he knows, deep down, that if he doesn’t catch anything, he’ll keep giving “last chances” until he does—Will murmurs to himself the lyrics from the Bricklayer bridge, “Hold yourself up, tear yourself down. Making mortar, making—”

“Will?”

He flinches into himself, forgetting his rod entirely to look behind himself, at the embankment, where a shadowy figure stands. He immediately recognizes Hannibal, by voice, by shape, by energy, and Will’s heart is racing before he can think to control it.

“Hannibal?” His voice wavers, half from the cold but mostly from the shock. “What are you doing up?”

Although he can’t see the doctor’s eyes, Will can hear his careful amusement as he says, “Sleep doesn’t come naturally to me, and I found myself alone. So I came to search.”

Warmth floods Will’s body against the wet chill, and he can’t help but imagine how worried Hannibal might have been to find him missing. How those dark eyes might have widened, how that steady pulse might have risen. He hates that he couldn’t have seen it firsthand.

His voice is as steady as he can manage as he says, “I’m here. Always.”

Hannibal’s sigh is louder than the crickets or the frogs or the water rushing, and he says, “Don’t you worry about being washed away?”

“Won’t take me anywhere.” Will reels in an empty lure, less disappointed than he expects. “Everything gets caught at the falls a mile down. Bodies can’t make it over unless pushed. It all just rots there against the rocks until the vultures get hungry enough or until the cops come to do their routine checks.”

A hand reaches out to him, and Will hesitates before walking toward it, overcoming the current and giving up on fishing entirely. He takes Hannibal’s hand to help him climb up onto the riverbank, where the mud under his feet is soft but the blades of grass are too sharp, threatening to slice the soles of his feet. Once he’s got his feet under him, Will hesitates before dropping the doctor’s hand. His skin is cool, supple but not able to fully mask his underlying strength.

As a blush rises to his cheeks, Will’s grateful to have the darkness of the night to hide behind.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Hannibal asks as Will sets his rod aside and leans against an old oak, its bark pressing into the bare skin of his back with a delicious scratch. His legs start to tremble, close to cramping, and after a moment, he slides down to sit at the tree’s base, pulling his knees into his chest. Hannibal keeps his distance from the trunk—probably doesn’t want to snag his expensive pajamas, Will thinks—but stands close enough to press his shin against the side of Will’s calf.

Will glances up at Hannibal, whose wheaten hair shimmers under the moonlight. He swallows back a pang of desire and says, “No. Nap threw off my clock.”

The appraising hum he gets in response goes straight to his groin, and Will’s underwear isn’t half as good at hiding his interest as his jeans are. He shies away from the pressure of Hannibal against him and wraps his arms around his legs, pulling himself into the smallest ball he can manage. When he presses his cheek to his knees, Hannibal bends over to run a hand through Will’s curls. His hand settles at the nape of Will’s neck, a strangely comforting weight, and he says, “Let’s go. A trance will do you good.”

A spark of dangerous excitement finds kindling in Will’s stomach, and he studies Hannibal as well as he can without moving, without giving a reason for Hannibal to take away his hand, Will’s anchor.

“Hannibal?” he murmurs after a moment, his thumbs worrying at his muddy ankles. When he gets another hum, the vibrations of which travel down through him with an amplified resonance, Will says, “Why didn’t you come to our show in Baltimore?”

There’s a measured silence, then a simple answer. “I was asleep.”

Will does look up then, frowning as Hannibal’s cool hand shifts against his skin. “But you said—”

“It takes a great deal of effort for me to fall asleep, Will. But once I do, I don’t wake until there’s something to wake for.”

Starting to shiver, Will bites his lip and runs his fingernails against his shins, scratching at points and gliding over hair at others. Although he thinks he might already know the answer to his question—how he knows it is another matter entirely, and one Will doesn’t want to consider right now—he wants to hear Hannibal say it. “What woke you up this time? The earthquake?”

“You did, _ma sirène_.” Hannibal’s mouth moves around the name for the first time, and Will knows enough bastardized French from the bayou to know what it means, and it feels warm like praise as it curls in his chest. Only in his dreams has he ever been something as desirable as a siren, as powerful or beautiful. But somehow, with splintering drumsticks and blood-splattered calfskin, he called out to the horizon, drawing Hannibal from his slumber.

“The earthquake was nothing but an aftershock,” Hannibal adds when Will doesn’t respond. Pulling his hand away slowly, Hannibal says, “Come, Will. I’ll put you to sleep.”

***

Following behind Hannibal, placing his feet in Hannibal’s footsteps, comes naturally to Will, and he focuses at a single point of Hannibal’s back between the ridge of shoulder blades he can only imagine under the blue material of his pajamas. Something in him can’t help the urge to reach out and brush his fingers across the material, press against the resistance of the firm body underneath.

He does reach out, not all the way, but enough that, when Hannibal abruptly stops in front of him, Will runs into him hand first, and he gets a delicious taste of soft, washed cotton before he trips over his own feet and ends up in the grass.

When he looks up at Hannibal, warm incandescent light from his house’s windows catches on the drawn expression on the doctor’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Will asks as he crawls to his feet, brushing stray grass from his knees.

Hannibal takes a cautious step closer to the house, frowning at it, and then his face goes perfectly blank as he says, “Go back to the river, Will.”

“What?” Will squints at his own house, familiar in every way, and wonders if he needs glasses to see whatever Hannibal is seeing. It’s just his house, with the kitchen light turned on, the door slightly ajar. It doesn’t occur to him at first, as he’s distracted by the way Hannibal’s mask hardens, that perhaps this is not how Hannibal left it.

A series of overlapping barks breaks the peace of the night, and Will thinks he can hear Winston in the mix.

The look Hannibal gives him then is pure command, hard and unyielding and laced with something that Will thinks might be concern but can’t be sure. Hannibal repeats himself, his voice low, before saying, “Ms. Lounds has come to visit.”


	6. Reflections in Hammered Bronze

Will’s first instinct is not to obey Hannibal’s command, although something in the back of his head, just where his spine connects him to his body, revolts at the thought of disobeying. That part of him makes his gut turn, and Hannibal’s eyes narrow as he says, “Go, Will. Stay until I come for you.”

Will bites his lip, searching Hannibal’s eyes and hoping against hope that the doctor will kiss him. But he won’t ask, won’t dare to do anything but nod, turn on his heel, and start back to the river. He pauses just beyond a large tree to glance over his shoulder, only to find Hannibal watching him still, making sure he goes all the way down. No one has ever cared so much for him, Will thinks with a tiny smile. Not even Bev, although she tries.

He comes to stand on the riverbank, his toes sinking into the mud, stamping down the tall grasses. Wrapping his arms around himself and staring across the water to the trees on the other side, Will wonders if Bev is worrying about him. If Jack is concerned. If Price and Zeller would care.

They used to be such good friends, the kind that would never fight except over a close round of Mario Kart. The kind that started a band, the kind that thought they could go somewhere. It’s not that they aren’t friends now, Will thinks, but they’ve become more like family over the last few years as the Comfort Machine. A family that bickers and irritates each other and probably wouldn’t hang out so much if they weren’t family. But a family with love so deep no arguments can splinter them. Sometimes Will misses the kind of friends they used to be.

But what’s the trade off? A band, he knows. A band he loves, playing music he loves. Not playing the music he really wants to love. Soon, success. They’re so close they can almost taste it, and Jack’s almost more excited than they are. Will just can’t wait until they’ve made it, until they can give him a chance to show the world the sounds that’ve been trapped in his head for years.

Thinking about it begins to frustrate him, and he starts to wonder what Hannibal’s doing in his house with Freddie Lounds. He knows he shouldn’t think about it, lest his curiosity force him to break his unspoken promise.

Maybe they’re sitting at his kitchen table, talking around each other, with Freddie taking careful notes. Will doubts Hannibal would let her quote him. Maybe they’re in a screaming match across the living room. Unlikely, since Will can’t imagine Hannibal ever raising his voice. Or maybe they’ve fallen in love with each other, so fast Will can’t even find the time to be jealous until his chance at Hannibal is ripped from him.

He doesn’t care to analyze what it might say about him that the thought of losing Hannibal to Freddie Lounds is what compels him to turn away from the hypnotic rush of the river. He doesn’t want to think about anything except finding out the truth as he sprints back toward his house, without any care to avoid stepping on sharp rocks or splintered branches.

His heart is pounding in his ears, louder than the ringing, louder than his gasping breaths, as he comes up on his house. The windows glow with warm light, and Will stumbles to a walk about fifty yards away from the building. Trying to catch his breath, trying to make himself invisible, he creeps up to the side of his own house, feeling like a stalker. He thinks, giddy from the adrenaline, that this is how Freddie must have felt. It’s addictive, thrilling, and Will enjoys it too much as he tiptoes up onto his porch, squatting low enough to hide under the windows.

Going to his knees and hoping it’ll quiet the creaking of the old porch, Will crawls to the window just behind his favorite chair. The wood digs into his hands and bare knees, and it keeps him focused enough that, when he peeks up into the kitchen, he can just barely bite back a gasp.

His stomach drops, and he feels empty.

Hannibal’s got his chin resting on Freddie’s shoulder from behind, wrapping his arms around her, whispering into her mess of copper curls. The only consolation is that she doesn’t look particularly pleased about the arrangement. In fact, Will realizes a moment too late, she’s clawing at his arms, her teeth bared, but she’s getting nowhere.

Suddenly, she seems much less dangerous than the man holding her, and Will’s arousal spikes aggressively. He wants nothing more than to be in her place, to feel the press of Hannibal’s body at his back, to revel in his strength, to fight back and be overpowered and pinned to the floor again.

But Freddie’s defense is verbal, and Will can’t hear her through the glass and his own bodily rhythms.

Neither can he hear the barking he thinks he should. He peers around the edge of the windowsill to see the living room, but he can’t make out any of his dogs over the furniture. Frowning, Will worries what’s happened to them. He reaches out, bracing his palm against the window and craning to get a better view.

Hannibal glances around, vaguely in the window’s direction, and Will ducks down, hoping he hasn’t been seen. His pulse is so fast he can nearly taste his own blood in his breaths, and somehow, most of the blood is flooding to his cock rather than his brain.

Pressing his cheek to the wooden clapboards, Will tries to calm himself, collect himself, tether himself to his body so he doesn’t drift away. If Hannibal finds him here, disobeying an explicit order, Will knows it’ll come out of his own hide, and although there’s nothing more arousing than the idea of it, the last thing he wants is for Freddie Lounds to watch. Then they’ll wind up in a magazine, and both of their careers will tank, and Will doesn’t even want Freddie to know when he eats or breathes. He doesn’t want her to know what Hannibal looks like up close, where his wrinkles sit, how his eyes glimmer, when his lips pull tight.

He wants to be the only one to know.

A muffled yelp pierces the air like a cymbal hit, and Will is locked into his body, feeling more connected to his limbs than he ever has. More alive than he’s ever been. He’s trembling, shaking violently, close to vibrating with tension. A drumhead still reverberating and waiting for the next beat. He only wishes he had the pain in his hands to keep him as focused as he is now.

Pulling together all of his courage, Will glances up over the windowsill once more, and since he ducked down, Hannibal has maneuvered Freddie into one of Will’s kitchen chairs.

Will watches as Hannibal kneels behind her back, using a length of natural rope to tie her wrists together. As he watches, Will thinks he can feel a sharp bite at his own wrists, and he glances down at his hands, but for once, there’s no blood, no new wounds, no reason for the psychosomatic pain he feels right where Freddie must be feeling it, too. Then he remembers the warmth of Hannibal’s hands around his wrists at yesterday’s late lunch, when the doctor had promised to deliver Will’s treatment himself. Biting back a moan, Will rubs his wrist, wishing there were rope there, and focuses on Hannibal again, who has moved on to tying a careful web of knots around Freddie’s torso and the back of the chair.

She’s crying, and her bright red nose and cheeks clash with her hair, which is starting to frizz out into a wild mess.

Hannibal says something to her, and although Will can’t hear it over the pounding of his heart, he imagines it comes in that warm, steady voice, the one that commands easily and sends shivers down Will’s spine.

Freddie starts thrashing against her bindings, and Will can’t fathom the fear in her eyes. It separates them in his mind, and suddenly the invisible rope at Will’s wrists fades to a dull itch, like a week-old tattoo. He can see her more critically now, can see the rip in the shoulder seam of her blouse, can see the recorder sitting idly on the kitchen table, its red light still blinking in a lazy rhythm. Will frowns, wishing he could run in and grab it, take it with him back to the river, and throw it in to follow the currents until it gets caught at the falls a mile down with all the other corpses nature has left there.

It’s like watching a movie as Hannibal grabs one of the rolls of duct tape from the Walmart bag, pulling a strip off with a loud crack that Will thinks he can hear even though he knows he can’t. It raises the hairs at the back of his neck, and he bites his lip, reaching down to palm himself as Hannibal raises the roll to his mouth to bite at the edge of the tape, tearing it off like he’s done it a hundred times.

Suddenly Will remembers what Price said as a joke, that Hannibal might be a serial killer. It’s less funny now—although it wasn’t very funny to begin with—and although Will knows that what he’s watching is straight from a horror flick, he can’t help but shiver in delight.

Something’s wrong with him, he knows. Probably a lot of things. But in this moment, as he watches through a pane of glass what he’s sure will be the end of Freddie Lounds, he doesn’t care.

Hannibal presses the strip of duct tape over Freddie’s open mouth, and her muffled scream is louder, hooking Will in the gut. She struggles in her chair, her hair floating around the jerks of her head from side to side as she tries to avoid the second strip of tape Hannibal is trying to place over the first. She doesn’t last long, and when he finally holds his hand over her mouth, some of her hair gets caught in the tape, and Will can see the tears pricking in her eyes.

It’s then that she sees him, and her eyes blow wide. The muffled screaming intensifies, and Will can almost imagine the begging words masked in all the noise. How strange, Will realizes, to have Freddie begging him for help when he couldn’t help her if he wanted to. Not to mention, he thinks with a dark amusement, he absolutely doesn’t want to.

Thankfully, Hannibal doesn’t seem to follow her wild eyes. Instead, he stands over her, reaching out almost gently to brush her wild hair away from her neck. Frowning, Will tries to focus on the way the doctor’s fingertips brush across the bared skin of Freddie’s throat, just under her ear, then around it. Something small, nearly invisible from the distance although it catches the light as it goes, falls from behind her ear, and Hannibal’s mouth pulls into a toothy smirk. Freddie’s whimper cuts through the ringing in Will’s head, and he can’t possibly pull his gaze away as Hannibal’s fingers tap along the side of her throat, stopping right where Will can feel his own pulse hammering in his own neck, at the heart of the blonde mermaid he’s carried around with him for years.

Hannibal bends to press his nose against her throat, as if whispering in her ear as she struggles against her bindings. Her hair hides Hannibal’s profile from Will as he stares openmouthed at what should have been nothing more than a panicked paranoia but was now becoming a reality. He can almost feel Hannibal slipping through his fingers, lost to Freddie Lounds.

She screams, and it almost sounds like she’s enjoying it.

Will’s legs start to cramp as he squats on his porch, peering into his own house like a stalker, and he is struck by the absurdity of the situation. He laughs before he can help himself, and when Freddie goes quiet, realization blooming in her eyes, that’s when Hannibal looks in Will’s direction, his teeth too white beyond the red gloss of his lips.

He’s almost certain he’s been seen.

Dropping to his knees, Will hurriedly crawls across his porch, scurries down the steps, and then sets off for the river at a flat run. Rocks dig into the soles of his feet and he nearly twists his ankle as he trips over a large root, and as he runs straight into the water, his chest burns so hot he thinks he’ll fizzle out like an ember before he can be reeled back in.

***

Time distorts under the water. Will’s not sure how long he’s been there, curled in the middle of the river with his eyes just above the surface. He comes up every few moments to release a long held breath and suck in a fresh one, and even in the time it takes to breathe, his wet skin is too cold in the night air. He’s shivering, struggling to keep his lips closed against the dark water as his teeth chatter. All his muscles cramp in waves, and Will can’t remember a time when he wasn’t in pain.

He doesn’t want to.

Maybe the light on the horizon is the sun, he thinks, trying to remember what time the sun rises in Wolf Trap in the summer. Surely he hasn’t been here four hours. Except maybe he has. Or maybe there’s no sun at all, and it’s just his imagination, and time has stopped entirely, and he’ll just sit there, half floating, half treading, until exhaustion takes over and he’s whisked down to the falls. But if he’s asleep or passed out, he won’t feel the rocks mangling his body, and that’s a prospect more unsettling than death.

But he’s got a while longer to go, he thinks, until his body gives out. It’s taken worse beatings than this. If only his mind could take what his body can.

A shadow crests the small hill that separates the riverbank from his house, and Will doesn’t come up for air until the figure stops at the top of the hill, staring down at him. What looks like a folding knife hangs from Hannibal’s hand, and Will lets his lungs burn as he observes from water level. His hair floats on the surface like moss from his native bayou, and Will half wishes he could submerge himself and drown without having to hear the disappointment, even anger, he expects will come in Hannibal’s voice. But somehow, he knows Hannibal would come into the river after him, drag him out and clear his lungs just to bring his wrath on Will for his disobedience.

It’s an oddly comforting thought, and Will tests himself by sucking in a deep breath of water through his nose.

He’s choking before any of it reaches his lungs, and it’s a violent sort of convulsion that propels him through the too-heavy water, coming up to the riverbank just as Hannibal comes down to meet him.

“Trying to lose the bloodhounds?” Hannibal asks, surprisingly casual as Will throws himself onto the muddy earth, clawing his way out of the water as he chokes and heaves for breath. When he looks up to Hannibal, stands of wet hair obscuring his vision, he sees the knife first. Its tip is bloody, and somehow Will’s first instinct is to think that it’s his own, even though he knows it isn’t. It might as well be. The toe of Hannibal’s shoe comes dangerously close to stepping on Will’s splayed fingers, but Will doesn’t have the energy or the desire to pull away, even as a drop of Freddie’s dark blood falls on his healing knuckles.

It probably clashes with her hair.

Will rests his cheek against the cool mud, starting to shiver even though he’s burning up inside. His sopping wet boxers cling to his body, and it only makes him shake more. Maybe he’s getting sick. Maybe that’s the best thing he can imagine, maybe second best behind Hannibal’s hands on him, even though that fantasy has been ripped from him to the sound of Freddie’s whimper. After what feels like an eternity, Will tests his voice and finds it weak and watery as he says, “What happened to her?”

Kneeling beside Will and reaching out to push the sopping, tangled curls from his face, Hannibal offers a tiny smile. His lips are reddened like he’s had a handful of maraschino cherries, and Will can almost taste the saccharine flush as a matching red spreads across his own cheeks. In one ear, he can hear only his tinnitus and the low hum of the earth—although perhaps they’re the same sounds—but in the other, there’s Hannibal’s wordless whisper, “She’s promised not to bother us anymore.”

Unable to help his wheezing giggle, tinged with the anguish of a forbidden jealousy, Will presses up into Hannibal’s touch, imagining his hand is a strip of duct tape. Then the mud becomes a chair and the water his ropes, and he’s happy to take Freddie’s place. All he needs now is for that knife to dig into him, to slice vents into his body for all the pressure to escape, to excise whatever parts of him threaten to devour him from the inside.

His moan comes out strangled, and Will can feel the tension shivering where his body is too cold despite the burning deep inside him, unreachable and unsatisfied.

Hannibal hushes him, almost fondly, and says, “Be quiet, Will.”

When he looks up to Hannibal, the doctor’s handsome face seems to warp, caught in a ripple of river water until it’s familiar in a different way. Will’s teeth snap down faster than he can move his tongue, and he’s swallowing his own blood and saliva and anxieties as he stares at his father’s face on a much larger, stronger body. The knife is still there, and Will tries to focus on the drip of Freddie’s blood rather than his racing heart, and when the hand in his hair shifts, Will looks up and Hannibal’s back, frowning down at him in what Will thinks might be concern.

That’s enough to separate the two men, Will thinks with a level of clarity that startles him.

“Are you ready to go back?” Hannibal asks, stroking a thumb across the high point of Will’s cheek and wiping away a tear Will hadn’t noticed. “I believe I promised to put you to sleep.” His voice is soft, calm, and he’s an anchor that keeps Will from floating away or, more likely, a bobber on the muddy ground, keeping him from sinking into the earth without the energy to claw himself out.

Nodding, Will isn’t confident enough in his voice to speak. But he gives a wavering whine as Hannibal’s hand falls from his hair and wraps around his shoulders instead, helping Will to his feet.

His legs feel useless, and as soon as Hannibal releases him, Will crumples down again, his limbs crushed under him. If he weighed more—if he weighed what someone his height should weigh—maybe he’d have broken something. But instead, a dull ache wraps around his right ankle like the chain tattooed around it. A large black ball sits at the soft spot just in front of his Achilles' tendon, and a lit wick coming from the top of it dances around the callus from the heel of his boots.

“It’s alright,” Hannibal says as he wraps one arm around Will’s shoulders and the other, the one still holding the knife, under his knees, picking him up with ease. He doesn’t seem to mind that Will’s drenched, dripping boxers start to seep into his own pajamas.

Instantly transported back to the guest room in Hannibal’s house, caught in a wild panic, Will cries harder, burying his nose into the doctor’s chest as he’s carried up the hill and back toward his house. A distant curiosity makes him wonder how familiar this embrace will become, how many times Hannibal will wrap him up and carry his weight when Will’s own legs can’t, how many times he can bear the impossible intimacy—he can’t have it, he has to remind himself, like telling himself off a drink or cigarette, and it only spurs on a new round of tears.

Hannibal whispers in his ear as they move through the night, and Will can’t tell whether it’s Hannibal’s real voice or the one that seems to whisper to Will without moving the air between them. It doesn’t matter, because he can’t understand the words anyway.

The shimmer of his tinnitus starts to take on a strangely feminine quality, nearly like the screams that died in Freddie’s throat, strangled by duct tape and faded away before they ever reached the night.

He sucks in a shuddering breath against the soft material of Hannibal’s pajamas, and he thinks he can smell a tinge of metallic blood, acrid and too sweet, mellowed by Hannibal’s usual musk. It smells natural on him, and Will reaches up to wrap his arms around Hannibal’s neck, holding onto him, pulling himself closer. The fall would hurt, would shatter the low buzz building in his lower back, and Will thinks the pleasure of the impact would be overwhelmed by the distress of losing the press of the firm body against him.

When he looks up over Hannibal’s shoulder, they’re coming up on his house, which looks exactly the same as it did when they came up on it earlier, except now the front door is closed, and it makes the light diffusing through the windows look more ghostly.

Swallowing back one last sob—a dry one, this time—Will takes a deep breath and says, nothing but a mere murmur, “Thank you, Hannibal.”

He means it, even though he knows it’s some strange admission, making him an accomplice. If it means Freddie is gone, Will is happy to implicate himself.

“You’re welcome,” Hannibal returns with a gentle hum, readjusting his grip under Will’s knees. The blade of the knife tickles across the side of Will’s thigh, drawing across a bare spot where his boxers would be if they weren’t bunched up in the angle of his hips. It’s not firm enough to cut him, not even enough to scratch, but the glint of the blade in the glow of incandescent lights is enough to draw a helpless moan from Will’s mouth, and he has a sudden impulse to press his lips to Hannibal’s neck.

Somewhere back in D.C., Will thinks to distract himself from the desire to kiss Hannibal, Jimmy Price is probably waking up with a start and the low, gut feeling that he was right about something. Maybe he doesn’t know what. Maybe he does. Maybe he’ll tell Jack to send in the search party. Maybe they’ll rip Will away from his own home and the virtual stranger that has taken it over. Maybe it’s Will’s last few moments with Hannibal. Maybe a siren will break the quiet night.

Or maybe, Will lets himself believe as Hannibal climbs up the steps to the porch with an elegant strength, maybe he’s alone in this world, with no one to chase after him. Except, maybe, the man carrying him home.

***

On the kitchen table is a broken recorder, with its tape spooled out in a mess that looks like black intestines. The chair at the table is empty, although there’s a small pool of blood at its legs with a steady dripping path all the way to the door. Will clings closer to Hannibal as he follows the path with his eyes until it disappears under Hannibal’s feet. But when Hannibal steps forward, he doesn’t follow the blood, instead carrying Will to the couch, where a tangled blanket and smashed pillow still lay from when Will tried to go to sleep. Maybe if he’d managed to pass out then, there wouldn’t be blood seeping into the floorboards, threatening to stain.

None of the dogs are in the living room, but the fire still flickers softly, and Will can’t remember the last time his house felt so empty. He glances up at Hannibal, whose eyes are carefully blank but whose lips look soft enough to devour, and says, his voice hoarse and quiet, “Where’s the pack?”

“In the bedroom,” Hannibal says as he gently sets Will on the couch, letting the knife slide under his thighs with the broad side of the blade dragging across his skin. “They didn’t need to watch.”

As if on cue, Will can just make out a persistent scratching at the bedroom door that he’d first written off as a new variation on his tinnitus. A few happy barks follow, as if they recognize Will’s voice or scent or energy. And then there comes an unholy cacophony that makes him jump, even though he recognizes it immediately. Rides and crashes and hi-hats all tumbling down together, reverberating against the hard surfaces of the room and resonating in the drumheads of the rest of the kit. He’s done the same thing, in moments of ecstasy or frustration, sending his whole kit apart in a flailing tantrum.

Then, like the aftershock of an earthquake, half a dozen dogs start yelping and howling at once, and Will finds the strength in his legs to jump up and run to the bedroom, opening the door and freeing the pack before Hannibal can stop him.

A wild cloud of fur passes around him, brushing against his legs and taking his strength with it. He collapses onto his hands and knees as Winston, with a bleeding cut just over his eye, takes up the rear. The mutt doesn’t stop to sniff him or whine for attention. None of the dogs do. They just run out the open front door into the night.

Heaving against the tightness in his throat, a slave to the desperate hammering of his heart, Will lets his head hang between his shoulders as he digs his fingernails into the floorboards, hoping for splinters or a trance to whisk him away. He blinks heavily, suddenly exhausted, and watches, upside down through his legs, as Hannibal approaches him.

“He’s hurt,” Will whimpers once he swallows down a few good breaths. A hand brushes up his spine, and Will jerks away from it. His voice is harsher now, belying the anger building in him, as he snaps, “He’s hurt!”

Hannibal touches him again, apparently not caring that Will can’t stand the warm shiver that follows his fingers, not when he’s dissolving into a puddle of instinctual, protective rage. When Hannibal says his name with the tone of a calm command, Will crawls away from him until he collapses among the mess of his broken drum kit. With all the energy he can muster, Will comes to sit with his back against the cold bite of a floor tom stand.

He glares at Hannibal, whose mouth is drawn tight, lips disappearing into a displeased glower, and says, “You hurt him.”

With a careful, practiced patience that seems to grate against the tension in Hannibal’s shoulders, the doctor says, “And who, exactly, did I hurt, Will?”

Will can’t help the laugh that bubbles up from his chest, half incredulous, half pained. Part of him wants to rattle off a long list, starting with himself and ending with a plea for more. But instead, he says Winston’s name, his voice breaking over the middle of it. “It’s all your fault,” he moans, mindlessly reaching out to brush a finger across the edge of the ride cymbal near his hip, which reflects a muddy phantom of the colors and designs across his body. Its sharp, bronze edge is glossed red, and Will’s fingers come back tipped with Winston’s blood.

Time slows for a moment as Will holds his hand in front of his face, observing the way his fingerprints look sharper where blood sinks into the grooves. The ridges start to warp without explanation, and a heavy drop rolls down Will’s finger over the scabbed remnants of a splinter.

When he glances up at Hannibal through his eyelashes, the look that meets him is darker than anything Will’s ever seen. Hungrier. To make up for its languid pause, everything goes into double time, and Will’s heart barely beats twice against his ribs before Hannibal is on him and a wing nut is digging into his back, feeling like it might go all the way through.

His gasp comes out strangled as the air is knocked out of him and one strong hand wraps around his neck just under his jaw. The other pins his hip against the cold cymbal, and Will doesn’t even have the wherewithal to worry about denting or cracking it. Instead, he bares his teeth, bucking against Hannibal’s weight, pressing up into the fingers that tighten around his throat.

Hannibal’s whispering something in his ear, but Will can’t make out any of it, until he hears, very clearly, the low, controlled command to, “Stop.” It’s nearly a growl, harsh and close to the chest as if it’s meant for the both of them, and Will can’t help the shiver that runs through him, no matter how angry he is or wants to be.

But he fights back anyway, against the direct order, and he gets what he’s been craving ever since Hannibal first took his wrists at the club in Brooklyn to look at LOVESICK inked across his fingers, as if that’s the only thing he needed to know about Will to know that he would be happy to melt under Hannibal’s body.

Will slips away before he can anchor himself, and he watches like a fly on the wall as their bodies writhe.

His face is going red, then starting to go blue, choked like a cymbal, and he watches as his mouth moves silently, begging for Hannibal to hurt him, begging for Hannibal to take and destroy him, begging for Hannibal to strangle him until he floats away into the abyss and even his distant vision goes dark. Except, none of the words come, and it’s just a string of breathless moans that sometimes rise to screams that won’t be heard through the night air.

In a moment of clarity, Will realizes he wants to die under Hannibal’s hand, trapped under his weight, and his cock gives a violent twitch. He’s suddenly watching through his own eyes again, staring at the intensity in Hannibal’s stare, the way it seems to glow in the incandescent light.

He wants to be kissed, but Hannibal’s lips are still drawn in a tight line as he bears down on Will, his wordless whisper in Will’s ear again as it says, “Behave, _ma sirène._ ”

That assumes Will has any control in the moment, but he doesn’t. He’s nothing but a passenger in his body as it acts without him. He floats above himself, too far away to feel the burning in his lungs, even though that’s the only thing that will pull him back. The room around them shivers in Will’s vision until it’s nothing but a blur, and the only things that exist in this trance—slightly different than the ones before, although Will’s in no state to analyze how—is Hannibal and himself. Not even the tinnitus survives, and it leaves Will feeling too vulnerable, too aroused for explanation.

All he can hear are the ragged breaths across his cheek, not his own.

Before he knows it, Will’s swept up off the floor, leaving the wrecked drum kit behind. In the haze, where his body isn’t his own, where he belongs to the man who carries him, where he barely believes he exists, Will doesn’t register the few steps to his bed until he’s being thrown onto it. His old mattress, soaked through with years of his nightmare sweat, doesn’t quite bounce, but it jerks the breath out of his chest anyway.

He blinks, and when he opens his eyes again, Hannibal is standing over him with the same coil of natural rope that Will watched him tie around Freddie Lounds.

Moaning, Will can’t say anything but, “Please.” But it comes out in a slur that’s impossible to understand, even to his own fuzzy ears. It’s a miracle, he thinks—although he thinks everything now is a miracle—that Hannibal seems to listen. The smile that grows across his lips is dangerous, too sharp, toothy in a way Will can only ascribe to fantasies and shitty teen romances he was always too old for. He grew up too young.

His father would call him a faggot if he could see him now.

The doctor works methodically, pulling out a length of rope and cutting it with the same bloody knife that Will knows killed Freddie Lounds. It makes him harder, and he doesn’t think he’s ever felt this tug in his core, so deep he can’t identify it to any specific organ except that part of him that makes him crave the ache.

It’s an infection, something in the back of his head suggests as Hannibal leans over him, so close Will thinks he can reach out with his soul and touch the man. An infection without a cure, an infection that will spread through him, ravage him, kill him.

“Hannibal,” he moans as he offers his hands up, using all his energy to cross his wrists at the headboard of the bed so Hannibal can bind him to it.

It’s not a gesture that goes unnoticed, and Hannibal’s hands on his wrists are too rough, manhandling him until the bite of rope at his skin is so sharp Will can’t help the tears prickling in his eyes. The doctor climbs onto the bed, straddling Will for the second time in as many days. Will’s throat feels too tight, and his eyes can barely focus, and he’s got one foot in his body and the other sinking into the water, getting caught in the currents of his subconscious until it’ll drag him away. Eventually, he’ll hit the falls, and all that will be left is a mangled corpse that still aches for the treatment only Hannibal can give him.

Sucking in a gasp of air that stings as it goes down, Will stares at Hannibal, at the monster that has come to inhabit that handsome body, and he’s so hard he thinks his entire body might spontaneously combust, leaving nothing but ashes behind.

There’s a lyric tugging at the back of his mind, but Will’s too far gone to remember it, let alone feel the accompanying rhythms through his limbs.

“I told you to go back to the river,” Hannibal says, his voice dark and his eyes darker. “But instead you watched.” It’s an accusation, a threat that ripples through Will’s body until his legs cramp and his cock demands release. He wishes he had his hands free, but only if they’re splintered to hell, burning and bleeding, able to rip himself open with one good stroke.

“Did you like what you saw?”

Will’s breath catches in his throat and he thrusts his hips up against Hannibal’s body, begging for release even though his mouth won’t move to his mind’s orders. His body belongs to Hannibal, and it answers only to Hannibal.

What a perfect freedom he finds in that fact, letting himself dissolve under the other man, who bends over him to run the tip of his nose down Will’s throat, sniffing at him without further comment until he gets to Will’s collarbone and murmurs into it, “What do you say, Will?”

The words fall from his lips before Will can even process them, and he’s offering repeated, mumbled, slurred apologies. His mouth doesn’t feel connected to his body, and he wants nothing more than for Hannibal to kiss him, but those thin lips never come.

Instead, Hannibal slides his arms under both of Will’s legs, hitching them up until his knees slam into his chest, stealing away Will’s desperate gasp of air, and his scream comes too late, breathless and silent. Something inside him wakes up from a very long sleep, dragged forth or reeled in through all the layers of suppressed fears and desires, and Will’s next scream comes out strong as he cries Hannibal’s name in a broken stutter.

Hannibal’s nose presses against his throat again, and Will turns his head, brushing his lips along the snake tattooed around his raised bicep, to bare his entire neck to the doctor. He almost thinks he can smell his own hot blood through his skin as his heart hammers it through his body, getting trapped in his erection. His arms prickle with countless tiny dots of icy heat, and it leaves his brain without oxygen long enough that his lightheaded pleasure urges him to wrap his legs around the doctor’s waist and hook his ankles together, pulling Hannibal closer.

Will can feel the firm ridge of Hannibal’s own arousal pressing into the crease where his thigh meets his hip, where his still-wet boxers bunch up and put too much space between them. The moan that rips out of him at the carnal realization that it’s not just him—that he’s hasn’t imagined the dark glint in Hannibal’s eyes—is enough to make Hannibal reach for a roll of duct tape.

Drifting away on a gentle wave, Will hopes he’ll remember this when he wakes up.

The crack of tape ripping off the roll sends a violent shiver through Will’s body, and he throws his head back onto a pillow, just barely missing the headboard where his hands are bound together. Staring down his nose, his vision shimmering with what might be tears or might be pure arousal, he focuses on the way Hannibal’s lips purse just slightly.

“Please,” Will hears himself murmur, even though he can’t remember opening his mouth to do anything but scream. Hannibal gives him a dark look, one brow raised, almost curious but mostly daring Will to continue.

When he doesn’t, Hannibal tears off a strip of tape and throws the roll aside, bending to hover over Will, holding the tape a few inches from his mouth. “Please what, Will?” His voice is rough, more affected than Will’s ever heard, and it makes his hips jump up, pressing into Hannibal’s weight for any friction he can find. Hannibal repeats himself, harsher, sharper now. “What?”

“Kiss me.”

The words are barely past his lips in a breathy moan when Hannibal shoves the tape across his mouth with enough pressure that the adhesive catches and pulls at the chapped spots on Will’s lips and a few stray whiskers he missed when shaving.

He tries to scream again, but it comes out muffled and gets trapped in his mouth, in his throat, in his lungs until it burns there and wastes away into a nasal whimper.

Will’s eyes fall closed, and in the blackness of his mind, he sees his own eyes trapped in the body of Freddie Lounds, tied to a chair in the kitchen. He looks less terrified than she did, and her red hair looks brighter against his dark eyes. A thick shadow, formless although Will recognizes him immediately, stands in front of the shell that is Freddie’s body. The glint of Hannibal’s knife is hammered bronze, cut out of a cracked cymbal, and Will can feel it digging into his hip even though the shadow raises it to Freddie’s neck.

“Not yet,” says the whisper that’s impossibly close, and his eyes flutter open, blurred and stinging, to see Hannibal’s face directly over his, a breath away. His eyes pierce him through, and Will can feel the warmth of his words through the barrier of silver duct tape as he says, “Not until I tell you to go.”

The tiny, jerking nod Will gives is mostly instinct, but it’s enough to bang their noses together. But Hannibal doesn’t pull back, doesn’t chastise him, doesn’t even glare. Will’s tongue darts out to taste the glue of the tape where it’s come loose from the moisture of his futile breaths. And then, one steady hand comes up to wrap around the side of Will’s neck, thumb pressing into his Adam’s apple, while the other brushes down his bare chest. He’s wet, either by river water or sweat—he can’t tell, although he thinks they might taste the same—and the hand slips down to wrap around his cock. The first stroke is slow and firm, but in the second, Will can feel the manicured fingernails digging into his sensitive flesh, dragging long furrows down the length of him.

Not quite like drumstick splinters. More controlled. More dangerous. More intoxicating.

Will’s hips buck up, and his moan is cut short by the pressure of lips on his, separated only by the strip of tape. There’s nothing Will wouldn’t give to have that barrier broken down so he can taste Hannibal.

Hannibal pulls away too soon, taking the weight and warmth of his body along as he grabs Will’s ankles from behind him, unwraps them from around his waist, and climbs off the bed. Will’s shaking starts up again, stronger now, and he tries to beg through the tape, using his body to say all the words his mouth isn’t able to. Isn’t allowed to.

It’s not enough, and Will feels the ache building in his chest. He can’t tell hallucinations from reality, can’t tell the bulge in Hannibal’s pajama pants from the sheer desire for its existence. Hannibal turns and retreats to the far side of the room, back to the collapsed drum kit, and disappears from Will’s focused gaze as he kneels down to the mess. It feels like a hundred cold years, an ice age passing in the blink of an eye, before the doctor stands again, carrying a glittering bronze disc with him back to the bedside to stand over Will.

The cymbal’s edge is streaked red, and a hairline crack rises from the aberration up to the bell, following a path like a strike of lightening over the only ship in the stormy sea. In the hammered metal, Will can see his reflection, and he’s never seen that man before.

He looks empty, the edges of his form unsteady and distorted, but his eyes pierce through. Those he can see perfectly, and they look black. A shock of sweet fear curls through him, and it’s almost familiar.

Glancing up to Hannibal, Will frowns and starts to struggle against the rope at his wrists. His arms are dead weight, and he can’t feel the way the rough cuffs dig into his skin, can’t feel the pain no matter how much he wants it, even once he sees the blood dripping down his arms in his periphery. There’s too much of it.

Hannibal’s jaw clenches and his gaze drifts to Will’s tense, trembling arms. Will takes it as permission to do the same, and all of his tattoos are disappearing under a steady flow of blood, opaque and thick, glossy like molasses. Lightheaded arousal floods him, and Will’s tears start to seep under the edges of the duct tape, and soon it’s starting to peel up. If he had control of his hands, Will would press it back down, beg for another strip like Freddie got, just to make Hannibal happy. Just to wipe that drawn, intense look off his face.

But he’s bleeding out, slowly disappearing from this life, and instead, all Will can think about is how much he wants Hannibal on top of him again, how much he wants those hands around his throat, how much he wants a knife to dig him open and release all the fears and sate all the hungers inside him. How much he wants a simple, hot kiss with nothing between them.

“Whose fault is it, Will?” Hannibal asks, still holding that cymbal like a shield.

Will mumbles behind the tape, and then in a sharp jolt of pleasure, Hannibal is ripping the barrier away, taking pieces of Will with it. Will’s scream is guttural and shuddering as his cock gives a feeble jerk.

Hannibal leans over him, his tongue darting out to swipe over his thin lips, and Will can just barely see the glint of teeth behind that tongue. All he can do is beg for a kiss until Hannibal presses his forearm across his throat, leaning in with enough weight that Will can’t breathe. He can’t remember the last time he could breathe. He can’t remember the fresh bite of air in his lungs. He can’t remember the great relief of a deep sigh.

“Whose?” It comes out as a rumbling demand that digs into all the cracks in Will’s mind and body.

Will doesn’t know, doesn’t even think it sounds like a word he knows. He searches Hannibal’s face, where the heat in his eyes is overwhelming, then he finds his own face in the mirrored shimmer of the cymbal. There should be a dark smudge where Hannibal’s reflection should be, but there’s only Will’s too-black eyes and the rest of his hallucinations.

The arm digging into his throat presses harder, and Will’s vision starts to darken around the edges. He doesn’t even realize his orgasm is close until Hannibal growls again, wordless and too feral. Then the heat in his core sends him up in an inferno, and all he can say using the last of his air, lost in a string of breathless screams, is, “Mine.”

“No,” Hannibal murmurs, releasing some of the pressure on Will’s throat just as he begins to black out. Will sucks in a wheezing breath that burns everything in him, wanting to curse the world, curse himself, curse everything that kept him from going. Everything except Hannibal, whose voice is ragged as he says, “Not yet.”

Will can’t tell if it’s meant for him or for Hannibal himself.

Hannibal raises the cymbal to rest across Will’s stomach, covering the stag’s head and the splatter of come across his skin. His boxers should’ve caught the mess, but they’re gone, and Will can’t remember when they disappeared. The cymbal is too cold, too loud as it resonates with the pounding of his heart in his gut. Will glances down at the metal plate, and its ridges are overflowing with that same dark blood that warped his fingerprints.

“It’s not your fault, _ma sirène._ Nor is it mine,” says the faltering whisper when Hannibal’s lips don’t move except to form a tight line that matches the sudden flare of his nostrils. He does open his mouth to say, steadier now, “It’s _theirs_.” That’s when Will sees the two elongated teeth like a dog’s canines but sharper like a snake’s fangs. He can’t help the way his pulse spikes, the way his spent cock tries to come back to life, the way his fuzzy mind shuts down and focuses on the hallucinations that shift through his reality. He’s staring at a monster, the sort that his father would beat him unconscious for believing in.

_That bullshit’s not real, you fucking mistake of a cocksucker_ , he would say, words slurred almost beyond recognition. _I’ll show you what’s real_.

And then two strong fingers dig into the rise of Will’s collarbone, just past the muzzle of one of the two dueling pistols across his shoulders, and Will can barely gasp a plea through the blood flooding his mouth before the ringing in his ears returns, louder than ever, so shrill it pierces his mind and leaves him deaf. His vision dissolves into chaotic ripples, and everything’s too hot.

The last thing he hears, the only thing that’s louder even than the roar of blood in his ears, is Hannibal’s command to, “Sleep.”

The last thing he feels, when all the pain slips away, leaving him to float in a weightless void, are lips at his throat.

***

_Hot rain slams the decks, and cold waves batter the hull. He’s the only one left onboard. Candy-striped lifesaver around his neck, rope caught in the gears of the anchor winch. Dragging him across the deck inch by inch. Two severed arms, one at the shoulder, the other at the elbow. One leg eaten by a great beast, the other beaten to a pulp. Parts of his body litter the ship, washing around with the drag of curling swells._

_Escape is impossible, and he knows it._

_Land is days in any direction. The sandy floor is miles away, and the heavy chain of the anchor quickly disappears into the thrashing waves. He just as quickly approaches the winch that’ll grind what’s left of him to a bloody chum for the great beast below that’s already devoured part of him, already got a taste for his flesh._

_Staring up into the fierce viscera of the sky, tumultuous and black enough to eat up the light, he tests his voice and it comes out weak and watery. A clash of thunder drowns out his whimpering pleas, and he can see the electricity building in the clouds above, twinkling like faraway stars._

_A bolt of lightening gets him before the winch or water._


	7. The Ripest Peach

It’s uncomfortably warm when Will blinks awake, staring at a small chandelier hanging from a plaster ceiling. His breaths are deep, slow, but he feels feverish and his limbs are heavy, weighted down under several thick blankets, and they won’t move no matter how much he wills them to.

Glancing around, he recognizes the room as Hannibal’s guest room, and Will frowns, turning his head with all his effort to face the window. Hot midday sun streams through the gossamer thin curtain, catching motes of dust as they dance through the too-still air, and Will tries to remember what day it is.

Although he vividly recalls seeing his dogs, vividly recalls the way Hannibal looked so comfortable while standing over an unfamiliar stove, vividly recalls watching Hannibal torture Freddie Lounds—although he can almost reach out and brush against those memories without any trouble at all, he can’t remember the surrounding parts except as a shimmering haze.

He just knows he hurts, that his entire body feels leaden and broken, and he decides it was all a dream. All one of his nightmares that he doesn’t usually remember at all, but this time he does. Just a piece here and there.

Somehow he remembers.

He lays there in bed for another eternity without a clock to go by, staring at the ceiling and counting his heartbeats as they come. Eventually, when the heat becomes overbearing and he thinks he might suffocate if he spends another heartbeat under the blankets, Will takes a deep breath and begs his body to move. His legs thrash out, his arms swinging, and before he can control the motion, he’s crumpled on the floor with his arms trapped under his body and his legs splayed awkwardly.

At least it’s cooler there, with his cheek pressed against the floorboards, as he stares at the other side of the room under the bed frame.

It reminds him, distantly, of hiding in his childhood bedroom, in the sliver of space between his twin bed and the wall, carefully watching for a creak of the door and a crack of light to portend a dangerous night. The trances started then, in one way or another, as Will learned to leave his body for the safety of an omniscient viewer. Someone watching on, a voyeur without empathy. The privilege of a moviegoer who knows it’s all just tricks of the light, clever cuts and stunts and makeup. He’s watched enough credits roll to know that everyone survives the filming.

And if they don’t, they get a heartfelt memorial card, declaring to the world that they were loved. In Memoriam of a memory Will can’t quite grasp.

The distant chimes of a grandfather clock toll three times, and Will heaves a sigh, hoping Hannibal won’t be angry with him for sleeping so long. He can’t remember what happened last night, after Hannibal made the call to Beverly. Maybe he just curled up in bed immediately and slept there for the entire evening until now. Nearly twenty-four hours of sleep should feel more restful, Will thinks bitterly.

When he finally manages to press himself up off the floor, he sees the friction burns around his wrists, and they sting terribly as he sits back on his heels and starts to rub them.

“Fuck,” he murmurs to himself, digging back through the mush of his memory to find the rope that matches the twisted pattern etched into his skin. His voice is hoarse, his throat scratchy and dry, and his lips are chapped and swollen. But even with all the triggers, all the little visceral memories, all he comes back with after traipsing through his mind is a fog, the usual result of a trance.

He sighs again, letting his head hang for a moment before he clambers to his feet, using the bed as an anchor to steady himself. He’s bare chested and wearing a pair of boxers he’s almost certain he left in Wolf Trap last time he packed for the band’s string of gigs. None of it makes sense, and the confusion makes him nauseous.

Then the hunger makes him even more nauseous.

This must be what Zeller’s hangovers are like, he thinks, remembering the dark circles that always appear under his bandmate’s eyes the morning after a good show. Will doesn’t remember drinking anything, and just the thought of alcohol makes him grimace. He’s probably dehydrated, he decides, considering the sweat that’s drying itchy across his entire body. His boxers are crunchy with it, and Will’s nose scrunches up as he realizes his bag is missing from the armchair beside the door. None of it makes sense.

Will’s not sure he could make sense of it if he tried, if everything was laid before him in perfect order. Waking up usually brings with it more clarity. At the very least, he can usually recall his mistakes. But now, rubbing his eyes until they burst with colors from the nothingness of his mind, there’s nothing except a sequence of strange vignettes, playing over and over in his head. He gets caught on one of Hannibal in the kitchen of his home in Wolf Trap, preparing a meal from nothing, and Will wonders how his mind could so easily superimpose such an intimate, detailed version of the man into a setting he’s never interacted with. The shine of his carefully styled hair, the shifting muscles of his forearms under rolled shirtsleeves, the begging dogs with their noses turned up to him.

It’s a dangerous path to go down, Will knows, so he pulls himself from it before it can whisk him away.

His stomach roils as he stumbles out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the kitchen of Hannibal’s house. There’s no distant orchestra this time, no lights turned on along the way, and the house feels oppressively rich and dark. The steps creak under his feet, just loud enough to be heard over the low hum of his tinnitus, but there’s no movement to match his, nothing coming out of the woodwork to stop him or pull him away.

Phantoms of touch curl at his shoulders and under his knees, and Will’s brow knits as he thinks back for the hands that left those marks on his psyche. Some sudden thought hits him, that he’s been carried down this way before, although Will can’t find it in the haze.

Par for the course, then.

When his feet hit the floor, too cold and hard, Will pauses to focus on the sounds of Hannibal’s house in the middle of the day. Last time he woke up, there was a radio to follow, a host to be found in the kitchen, preparing a lunch for the both of them. But now there’s nothing, even as Will squeezes his eyes closed to hear through the ringing in his ears.

He moves towards the kitchen anyway, hoping there’s still some fruit to stabilize his blood sugar or treats he can take from the refrigerator without worrying about being caught. Although, he imagines, Hannibal might take detailed account of what all is in his kitchen against that very possibility.

But even the kitchen is empty, with the oven’s display showing the time, six minutes past the hour, and the refrigerator grumbling with the production of new ice. As hot as it was in the guest room, in the kitchen, it’s too cold, and Will’s shivering before he notices it. Rubbing his hands up and down his arms, Will makes a lazy round of the kitchen before snagging a fresh peach from a bowl on the counter.

It’s painfully sweet as he bites into it, making his canines ache even as his tongue laps away the stray juice. A too-familiar rot threatens at the back of his throat, where the peach could ferment into something more bitter.

Sighing, Will turns and leaves the kitchen, his feet padding over the tile and then the wood as he returns to the foyer and drifts down the hallway back toward Hannibal’s study, the same one that set the scene for a call to Beverly. Biting his lip after swallowing down the last chunk of peach mush, Will hopes Beverly isn’t worrying about him. Just as quickly, he hopes that she is.

Pausing to study a portrait hanging on the wall of the hallway, Will frowns and licks away the remaining peach juice, which is drying sticky over his fingers.

It’s Hannibal, or maybe one of his ancestors, although the resemblance is uncanny. He looks like any other Victorian lord with the high collar and the blank expression. His hair is a bit longer, curling around his ears, and he wears a careful mustache that looks sharp despite the slight blur of the photograph. Dark eyes, almost black to the camera, bore through time to pierce Will as he stands there, the breath taken from his lungs.

His heart beats faster, and he has to drag himself away from the portrait before it enthralls him completely, but as he takes a step down the hall, Will catches his reflection in the glass of the photo’s frame. He looks tired, but that’s hardly a surprise to him. What shocks him instead is that he’s clean shaven, but for a thin layer of stubble, less than a day’s worth. Reaching up to scratch at his cheek, Will frowns. He doesn’t have a shaver here, that much he knows, and he doubts Hannibal would have a safety razor to offer him, let alone a straight razor, especially if Will was in one of his trances. That would end badly, and he’s sure Hannibal knows it.

Studying himself in the makeshift mirror—since he’s yet to find a real one anywhere in the house, which doesn’t quite compute with Hannibal’s clean, polished look—Will thinks he looks a bit more like his father than he would like. Older, even thinner than he already is. Like an addict.

His jaw clenches tight, and he can’t bear to look himself in the eyes anymore, so he stares at the tattoos climbing up his neck instead. It takes a moment, but as soon as he notices it, it’s all he can see. He reaches up to brush his fingertips over two little scabs, round and a little less than two inches apart, right over the chest of the blonde mermaid that Will’s carried with him for years.

They kind of look like nipples. A bit crooked.

He snorts even though a low dread starts to curl in his chest. He definitely doesn’t remember _that_ happening. He’s not even sure he knows what it’s from. If there had been a matching set of scabs beneath the first, he’d think he got bitten by a dog. But there isn’t a second set, and there aren’t any dogs here, anyway.

A dull headache builds at the base of his skull, and Will sighs heavily. He’s tired of being confused. But at this point, he’s not sure the answers he needs even exist.

Will finally pulls himself away from the portrait, and as soon as he takes five steps down the hall, he can hear the soft murmur of voices, masked by space, his tinnitus, and a solid oak door.

And yet, Will recognizes one of the voices as Hannibal’s. He’s not sure what to make of it, except that he can’t help but follow the sound of it to the door that he knows is the one to Hannibal’s study. Pressing his ear against the door, he starts to make out the individual syllables of a conversation. When Hannibal’s voice pauses, another takes over. Feminine, softer. After a moment, Will recognizes Bedelia’s careful intonation.

“I prefer not to do home visits, even for friends,” she says, sounding a bit exasperated, just like she had with Will in New York. Maybe she always sounds that way, he thinks. “My office is better suited.”

It goes silent for a brief moment, and Will adjusts his ear against the door, pressing harder against it. Then he hears Hannibal clearly, and it sends a shiver down his spine. “I can’t leave him alone.” There’s a finality to the way he says it, and Will bites his lip, a bit uncomfortable with the thought of being trapped in Hannibal’s house. But he knows, if he found himself alone in the house, he probably wouldn’t have left anyway. It’s not like he has any way to go very far. No car, legs that can barely hold him up, no phone or money. He’d be stranded.

“Why not?” Will can almost imagine the way she raises one eyebrow in a careful challenge. “He’s been alone this long, what’s one hour more?”

“Bedelia.”

That’s also a familiar tone, one that even Will wants to flinch away from. Dark, dangerous, not leaving any room for retort. Except Bedelia does retort, her voice matching his as she says, “Hannibal.” Will would be impressed if he wasn’t unsettled by how similar they sound now. “I know what you’re thinking, and you know what I’m going to say.”

“I know,” Hannibal says, and Will really wishes he could see the way his eyes must be glimmering with contempt. “I disagree.”

They don’t sound very friendly to Will, although part of him starts to wonder if this is the logical conclusion of a true friendship, the sort that he has with his band mates. Like family, where time brings them closer but reveals more needling weaknesses to exploit. He considers all the conversations between Price and Zeller he’s overheard in the last year alone. They sound a bit like Hannibal and Bedelia do now.

Will can just make out a sound that’s close to a sigh, and then Bedelia changes tack entirely to ask, “How was your sleep?”

“Long.”

“Restful?”

“As restful as thirty-five years can be.” Will can almost hear the sneer in Hannibal’s voice, and he frowns as he tries to decide what exactly that means. Somehow, he can’t quite accept that thirty-five years, the exact length of time he’s been alive, is a coincidence. He’s so deep in consideration that he misses the next thing Hannibal says, although he catches enough to hear him say, “As glad as I am to have avoided the floral drapes of the Eighties, I’m starting to think the house needs an update.”

Bedelia can’t seem to mask her surprise as she asks, “You’re going to stay awake long enough to redecorate?”

“Most likely.”

Will’s given up on trying to make sense of it all, even if only to keep his mind from drifting to the sort of things Freddie Lounds would believe in.

“How long will you stay this time?” Bedelia asks, her voice sounding tight like a disapproving mother. By Will’s memory—although that’s not much of a guarantee—she can’t be any older than Hannibal. But Will can’t imagine how she’s able to get away with that tone. Except, of course, that she’s apparently Hannibal’s psychiatrist. The pieces just don’t fit in Will’s mind, and the more he tries to force them, the worse his headache gets, the louder his tinnitus is, threatening to drown out his eavesdropping.

“Until Will comes with me.”

It hits Will like a bolt of lightening, and for a moment all he can hear is that shrill ringing in his ears, the echoes of a crash cymbal that hits all the worst frequencies. He pulls away from the door, reaching up to press at his eyes, massaging away the ice picks that are attacking him from the inside. It doesn’t help. Breathing hard and trying to keep silent, Will lets his forehead come to rest on the heavy door. It’s cold against his skin, and he thinks he might vomit if he doesn’t cool down soon, before his blood cooks him alive.

“Hannibal.” Bedelia’s stern disapproval is loud enough that Will can hear it through the slow decrescendo of his tinnitus. “We’ve been through this before.”

Will turns his cheek to the door, pressing as much of his skin against the wood as he can,and he’s rewarded with Hannibal’s pointed reply, which cuts through the wood to Will’s core like a fishhook, tearing a gasp from him before he can stifle it. “You met him. You see the potential.”

“Yes,” she admits, although she doesn’t sound particularly pleased by it. Will’s not sure if he’s pleased either, but he can’t deny the low thread of pride curling through his ribs and settling in like a weighted line. Biting his lip, Will tries and fails to repress the blush that rises to his cheeks. Bedelia’s quick to continue, saying, “But he doesn’t want it. He refused to even hear me out.”

Does he want it? Will doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, couldn’t narrow the “it” down to any single thing, but his instinctual reaction is that yes, he does want it. Badly. He’d go in blind if Hannibal told him to, and that realization is one that startles Will enough that he lets out a little yelp as if it’s physically hurt him. Then he focuses all his energy on denying the truth of it, telling himself he’d have to know the specifics first, that he’d have to weigh his options. He sucks in a deep breath and holds it until his chest burns before slowly exhaling, willing all the conflict to leave his body with it.

“How did you ask?” Hannibal’s voice is collected, measured just like Will remembers, and it does a little to relax him. Not much, but enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s going to faint anymore.

“What?”

Will imagines a tiny smirk pulling across Hannibal’s lips as the doctor says, “He won’t come for just anybody, but I believe he’ll come for me.”

It’s akin to a scratch between a dog’s ears, and Will can’t help his smile as the pride in him seems to grow, just enough to wrap around one rib a second time. Soon, he’ll be thoroughly bound by it.

“So you’re going to whisk him away and do what, exactly?” Bedelia asks, her cynicism unmistakable. Will wishes there were a keyhole he could peer through, wishes his trance could send him through walls. As it is, he can only try to picture the way her lips, probably painted a glossy, luxurious red, pull into a tight grimace. The way she crosses her legs one way and then crosses them the other, smoothing a skirt over her thighs each time. Or maybe she’s wearing those same white trousers as when she cornered him in New York.

Hannibal doesn’t respond for a breath, and when he does, his voice is softer, almost so quiet Will can’t hear him, and laced with a bit of uncertainty Will doesn’t think he’s ever heard. “I’m not sure yet.”

“It’s unlike you not to have a plan.” It sounds like an accusation, and Will thinks that’s probably how Bedelia intended it. She doesn’t seem like the sort to speak without considering her words first, no matter how quickly she responds.

Will bites his lip, worried that his low breathing is louder than the silence inside the study. When Hannibal speaks again, a shiver runs down Will’s back, stopping to curl into a ball of warm dread between his hips. “I need to determine his arrangement with his band. His commitment to them, if you will.”

“Oh?”

Bedelia’s taken the word from Will’s lips, and his brow knits as Hannibal says, “He feels unfulfilled with them.”

It’s not strictly untrue, and Will thinks it’s a reasonable if not accurate interpretation of what he told Hannibal at their lunch yesterday or the day before or whenever it was. He’s still not sure what day it is. Hopefully not past Wednesday, or the band will be furious with him. But no matter how frustrated he gets with having his best ideas pushed aside for more commercial options, Will wouldn’t say he’s unfulfilled by them. The opposite, in fact. The Comfort Machine’s the only thing that’s fulfilled him at all in the past five years, and it’s strange to hear how confident Hannibal sounds in saying otherwise.

His thoughts are so loud he almost doesn’t hear Bedelia say, “You think he’ll willingly leave his best friends for you?” She sounds curious but not as skeptical as Will expects.

“If I can give him what they can’t, yes.”

Will’s heart seems to falter over its rhythm, skipping a beat and then making it up three at a time in a flutter that feels like dying. He gasps for air, reaching up to claw at his chest, scraping deep furrows into a tangle of deeply painted roses and swallows. The pain fades as quickly as it came, and Will presses his back against the door to the study, letting himself slide down to sit with his knees pulled up to his chest and his head turned so one ear still rests against the heavy wood.

“Can you?” Bedelia asks, her voice still perfectly blank. A genuine question, and one that Will also wants answered, although he’s not sure which answer he wants.

He doesn’t want to leave Bev or Price or even Zeller. Doesn’t want to let down Jack. Doesn’t want to give up everything he’s worked for in his life, doesn’t want to let it all go just because a stranger showed up out of nowhere. Even if that stranger is Hannibal, the doctor that can heal him, the man that excites him in a way Will’s never been excited, the only person that’s given him the pain he needs and is willing to do it again.

And yet, the thought of giving up Hannibal is just as distressing. Will’s gut clenches hard, until his stomach rolls and twitches with cramps.

It’s with complete conviction that Hannibal says, “Yes.”

Will sucks in a deep breath, a bit guilty of how good that answer feels as it settles into his core and wraps around him. He knows, although he’s not sure how he knows it, but he knows that Hannibal’s telling the truth, and he’s almost certain Bedelia would have called him out otherwise.

But instead all she says is, “What is it he wants, then?”

“I’m sure he wants a great deal, like the horse on the long journey from the field to the stall. He wants stray bites of grass on the side of the path, which is inevitably sweeter than that which is within his fenced field. He wants the carrot in the rider’s pocket, even if he must bite fingers to get to it. He wants to explore the rocky trail that forks off his path and will dig into his hooves if he goes too quickly. He wants to jump the fences for no reason other than to feel the air under his belly and the wind in his mane. He wants—”

“Hannibal.”

Will stares at his hands, starting to rub at the inside of his wrist, not sure how he feels to be compared to a horse. If Hannibal had chosen a dog for his metaphor…

“He wants many things,” Hannibal continues, undeterred by Bedelia’s interruption. Will can almost imagine the way his eyes burn with an intense stare, one that not even Bedelia could possibly be immune to. “But what he needs is someone to guide him. A bridle with a curb bit if the snaffle won’t do, and the reins in the hands of someone who knows the origin, path, and destination.”

Letting his head hang, Will covers his ears with his hands, drumming at his skull with his fingertips in some rhythmless pattern that sounds more like clopping hooves the more he thinks about what Hannibal said. He doesn’t stop until he hears the creaking of a leather chair inside the study. Then he jumps to his feet, his pulse picking up. He’s ready to run, lest he be caught eavesdropping, but the door doesn’t open. Instead, there’s a long stretch of silence that feels too tense.

Bedelia’s voice is closer, and it sounds like she’s immediately behind the door as she says, “Your color is good. Have you been drinking?”

Frowning, Will tries to identify the tenderness in Bedelia’s voice. Motherly, in a way. Instead of shying away from the sudden proximity, Will leans forward again, resting his head against the door and trying to focus through the ringing to hear Hannibal’s response, curious whether he’ll be brusque or equally warm.

“Yes.” It’s perfectly even.

Bedelia hums in response before she asks, “Will?”

Will flinches back then, suddenly afraid he’s been discovered. His mouth opens as if he’s going to respond, and maybe he would have before he could control himself. But Hannibal’s voice seems to come from Will’s lips, masking his own quiet whisper.

“Just a taste. I stopped before I could get carried away.”

“Just a taste,” Bedelia repeats with a note of derision that curls cold in Will’s chest before a slow realization blooms in him. “How often is just a taste enough for you?”

It’s impossible, he thinks.

“Well,” Hannibal says, not without a faint humor that sinks in Will’s gut like a sea-frozen anchor, “I had a good bit more beforehand. Not enough to kill her, just enough to scare.”

Will’s mind is still, frozen itself, not able to process everything that hits him all at once. If he weren’t so viscerally connected to the door under his ear, pressed against his cheek hard enough to leave behind the imprint of its grain, if he weren’t so uncomfortably hot and sore, maybe he would’ve drifted off to a trance, where he doesn’t have to think about it all. But as it is, he’s trapped in his own body, forced to hear Hannibal’s words repeated over and over in his ears, fading into and around the tinnitus like a well-mixed master track.

Every new thought he broaches comes with a new sting of shock, but Bedelia doesn’t sound surprised at all, just disapproving as she says, “Scare? You left her alive?”

“She’s a journalist without evidence.” It’s then that Will can’t deny it anymore, can’t pretend they’re talking about anyone other than Freddie Lounds.

It comes back in a sharp flash, filling out the parts of his memory that never left him. And it’s almost like he’s there again, kneeling on his own porch and staring wide-eyed and painfully aroused through a window into his kitchen, where Freddie’s red curls are too bright in the warm light, and Hannibal’s barely more than a shadow. They’re too intimately close, and Will’s jealousy sparks up again, and he can barely keep himself from letting out a low noise, almost like a growl.

He’s not sure if he glad she’s still alive. It only means she’s still out there, looking for him.

“I destroyed her recorders—both of them. She was well prepared, but not well enough. No one will believe her if she says anything,” Hannibal continues, as if what he’s saying is perfectly normal. Maybe it is, Will thinks. Maybe it is to the both of them, in which case…

Will doesn’t want to admit he’s in over his head, doesn’t want to admit that maybe Jack was right, maybe Price was right, maybe they were all right. Bev would’ve kept him from dying for one night, and then it would have all been fine—at least until the next time—and Will wouldn’t be here right now, listening to his newest obsession confess to whatever it is he did to Freddie Lounds. Will’s still not quite sure what to call it, but it’s a deeply uncomfortable knowledge that whatever it is, it’s nothing short of evil. Evil, like out of a million movies Will’s never seen.

More than all of that, Will doesn’t want to admit that he’s so achingly hard he thinks he might come all over the door if he so much as brushes his cock.

“They’ll just think she’s hungry for the attention, that she’s so obsessed with him she can’t think straight,” Hannibal says, and it comes with a note of contempt, the sort that Will always expects to hear pointed at him but still hasn’t yet.

Bedelia’s sigh is loud enough that Will can hear her clearly this time, and he can’t help but imagine how her delicate brow might knit over too-sharp eyes. “Hannibal,” she says, sounding exhausted like an overworked mother, “what have I told you? When you get too close, you lose—”

“Yes, I know,” he says, more impatiently than Will’s ever heard. It doesn’t leave much room for discussion, and Will wouldn’t have the gall to attempt it. He barely has the nerve to stay there, breathing shallowly as he strains to hear every last word, looking for answers hidden beyond the words. His headache flares up the harder he tries, and it only makes the warmth between his hips swirl violently like a whirlpool in the middle of the ocean, about to be sucked up in a waterspout and relocated miles and miles away.

But Bedelia can give Hannibal what Will can’t, and it means she must know him better than Will does, and as miserable as that makes him feel, he’s a bit grateful that she continues on like a fearless captain.

“If they realize you’re awake again,” she starts, pausing long enough that Will imagines she might be staring up at the stag’s head over her own, looking for Hannibal’s reflection in its glass eyes, “it’s only a matter of time until old acquaintances come out of the woodwork.”

There’s a sickly long moment of silence, and Will thinks she probably can’t find a reflection at all. He couldn’t. He knows he couldn’t, although he still can’t remember ever looking for one. Can’t remember if he did or not, or if it’s just a sort of instinctual knowledge, like knowing he wouldn’t survive a week at sea even though he’s never tried. Reaching up to touch the scabs at his neck, Will feels a bit sick, lightheaded and dizzy, and his legs wobble under him, and he hopes he’ll reach land soon.

“You can call them enemies, Bedelia. That’s what they are.”

Now it’s her turn to be quiet, and it feels less natural to Will, like she wants to say one thing but won’t let herself, instead settling on, “They didn’t used to be.” It’s one more thing that doesn’t make half a drop of sense to Will, and he’s so lost now that he doesn’t even try to process it other than to file it away for later, when he’s alone with all the time in the world. “They used to be family.”

There’s a sharp laugh that doesn’t even sound like it belongs to Hannibal, although Will knows it must. It’s certainly not Bedelia’s, and it’s not his own, which he knows only because he’s biting his lip to bleeding and hasn’t been discovered yet.

It’s another long tense, quiet stretch before Hannibal says, “At the risk of bastardizing our doctor-patient relationship, how’s your practice doing?” When she doesn’t respond immediately, he adds, “Are _you_ drinking?”

“Substitutes, mostly,” she finally admits, sounding a bit ashamed of it. “A few willing donors, when they come around. I don’t…hunt. Not anymore.”

“We were never meant to live like this.”

Bedelia’s laugh is hollow, and there’s a visceral ache in her voice, one Will recognizes intimately, as she says, so quiet he almost can’t hear her over his own rushing blood, “We were never meant to live at all, Hannibal. We’re monsters.”

Will sucks in a breath through his clenched teeth, thinking that’s the truest thing he’s ever heard. His eyes sting, and he blinks rapidly, staring at LOVESICK the entire time.

“No,” Hannibal says, firm and steady and serious and everything Will loves about his voice. “We’re just vampires. Just like the rest of them, even the ones that’ve never had a drop of blood at all.”

He’s going on, but Will doesn’t hear any of it. His entire body is tense, every muscle tight and wound and starting to cramp. Every tendril of arousal has left him, leaving him feeling empty and cold and hungrier than he’s ever been before. So hungry it feels like his body is about to cannibalize itself, wrench him apart from the inside out, leave nothing behind but a pair of eyeballs and a stained, scarred skin that no one could ever want, not once the blood inside it is all drained and swallowed.

The punctures at his neck burn, and when he looks down and focuses on his hands again, there’s bloody scabs under his fingernails and his knuckles look terribly infected.

Vampires, he thinks slowly, testing the word to see if it’ll cut his tongue. It’s a blank sort of consideration, like when his father told him he’d knocked up some teen girl from town, and Will would have a baby brother or sister soon. There’s nothing he can do but accept it, even if he doesn’t want to.

What’s worse is that somehow, somewhere hidden in all the repressed, heavily locked realms of his mind, he already knew. He was just scared of it, like a rabid dog.

The sister never came—and Will’s sure it was a girl, even though they never had the ultrasounds because the mother was dead before she made four months, but he’s sure he has a little sister waiting for him when he does finally die; he calls her Mercy because that’s the only blessing she ever had, that their father took the mercy on her to keep her from coming into the world and having to bear the miseries of being his child—but it’s the same sort of instinctual knowledge as before that he won’t be able to escape this new truth, his truth, the way his almost-sister escaped hers. There’s not enough mercy left in the world for him.

And no matter how much the guilt for it starts to fill the vacuum in his gut, Will knows he doesn’t want to escape anyway. Not really.

His body snaps into motion before his mind leaves its hazy consideration behind, and he’s running down the hall he came from, passing the portrait without a glance, although he can feel the sepia-dark eyes following him. He runs and keeps running, not even trying to keep quiet now, until he passes a window in the foyer and a smear of red catches his eye. Stopping just long enough to blink back the tears that are blurring his vision, Will sucks in a shivering breath that settles in his chest like a gallon of antifreeze.

He knows that car, that sporty little fantasy, the same one that nearly killed him last time he was in Baltimore. They avoided collision by a mere heartbeat at a breakneck tempo.

The collision came later, though, under the spotlights in a too-dark, too-hot club in Brooklyn, when Will’s lips were as red and glossy as Bedelia’s car. Like fate, he thinks. Maybe he could have outrun it a while longer, but he knows it would’ve caught up with him eventually. He’s tired, doesn’t have much fight left in him. And what’s wrong with the collision, anyway? If it knocks his jumbled pieces back into place. The dislocated shoulder needs a sharp pull. Bev’s reset his a hundred times, now it’s time for someone else to take over.

A whisper comes from inside his head, low and dark, and it says, “Not yet.”

Will’s still standing there, staring at the red car through the window, desperately wanting to call Bev and tell her everything—nothing, really, because he knows everything is dangerous and impossible; instead he’ll tell her about how he’s got a new idea for the band, a whole concept album about vampires, and she’ll laugh at him, and it’ll all be okay—he’s still standing there when the footsteps come up behind him. He hates that he can tell Bedelia’s gait from Hannibal’s by sound alone.

“Will?” Hannibal’s voice is low, firm but gentle, and his hand brushes the top of Will’s bare back as Will turns to stare up at him, feeling something almost like betrayal deep in his chest, lost in the empty chill. He’s not sure he recognizes the man that asks, “Are you alright?”

Hannibal’s eyes dart down to Will’s neck, and his jaw clenches. Over Hannibal’s shoulder, Will can see the frown setting into Bedelia’s face. It’s only the second time he’s ever seen her, although it would be the third if her reflection in the red car’s mirrors wasn’t also missing. At the time, he thought it was lost in the dark, but he knows better now, he thinks sourly. But even then, she seems so familiar Will can barely pull his eyes away before he’s looking for the ways her face has aged over the course of the days since he last saw her. He’s not sure how many it’s been—he’s still not sure which day it is—but it’s certainly not long enough for the wrinkles around her lips to have grown as deep as they are. She looks older, close to ancient. Timeless, in the way only storybook characters are.

“Will?” Hannibal prompts again, sounding almost concerned.

Swallowing heavily, Will meets Hannibal’s eyes again and tries to ignore the curl of doubt wrapping up his spine.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he can manage, almost mindless with how naturally it comes. Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s doubt, maybe it’s just shame that makes him feel like his body is trying to shrivel into a tiny, invisible shadow. “I need to go.” His voice is weak, but even weaker still as he adds a pathetic, “Please.”

Hannibal glances over his shoulder at Bedelia, who sends him a look that must say enough, because then Hannibal gives a sharp nod and says, “Beverly said you can stay with her, if you need.” He pauses, and Will’s too startled to respond immediately. Is that the big secret Hannibal kept from him? The message he wouldn’t divulge, no matter how much Will begged? Will remembers begging now, remembers spiraling into a panic when the begging got him a sharp look. Still can’t remember what comes after, what links that version of himself to the one standing here, begging again. Hannibal’s eyes are too soft now as he says, “I’d rather you aren’t alone.”

He must not know how much Will knows, then, Will thinks with a bitter laugh that tastes like sweet, fruit-fermented vomit. The giggle bubbles up and spills out of him, but unlike if he were sick, he doesn’t feel better once it’s out of him. He just feels tired.

It’s a miracle, then, that his legs don’t collapse under him. It’s a miracle he can turn wordlessly and walk up the stairs to the guest room just to remember that his bag is missing.

“It’s still in the trunk,” Hannibal says as if he can read his mind as he comes up behind Will. “I’ll drive you back to Washington.”

The offer sounds like a entreaty, but it falls on ringing ears that might as well be deaf. Or maybe he’s been deaf his entire life, and now he’s finally hearing the world around him. He expected it would soothe him, but all it does it dig its claws deeper, and he’s going to be sick for real this time, bringing up fermented peach and bile. Will shakes his head, trying to ignore the way his body trembles when he breathes. He’s never felt more like a cracked cymbal, a splintered drumstick.

“I’ll take the train.”

That’s the last thing he says for the next forty-eight sleepless hours.


	8. Infection

“At least give him some vodka, too,” Zeller says as Beverly pours a tall glass of pulpy orange juice. She finishes off the rest from the mouth of the carton and tosses it into the recycling bin near the refrigerator. As she carries the glass to Will, who’s sitting with his elbows on his knees on her couch, the singer calls after her, “Fuck knows he deserves it!”

But Bev ignores him, and when Will takes the glass from her, she runs her fingers through his tangled hair and says, “You’re probably still too dehydrated for juice, but the sugar should help the headache.” Then she produces two little pills and bumps his elbow until he takes them from her too.

Will doesn’t say anything, but he gives her a weak almost smile before sipping the juice and throwing back the painkillers. She’s been offering them to him for the past hour, but he only just now thinks he might be able to keep them down. The juice is too sweet, making his teeth ache, and the pills catch in his throat and take too long to get to his stomach, but she’s right, and his headache seems to fade almost immediately. He’s not sure that’s really the way it works, medically speaking, but he’s grateful for the relief anyway.

“Fuck knows _I_ deserve some vodka,” Zeller says from his seat at the bar in Bev’s kitchen. He clambers off his stool and starts to dig through her cabinets as if it’s his own house, but there’s only food and tableware. “Bev, babe, where’s your booze? I’ll pour shots all around.”

Bev shoots him a look. “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?”

“What? Christ, it’s past six, we’re _late_.”

Will groans as he leans his head back to finish off the juice. It makes his vision swim a little, and suddenly there are steady hands on his shoulders, keeping him from falling back onto the couch. They’re familiar hands, ones that’ve done this before, but not the ones he really hopes for. Not the ones that send shivers down his spine and spark warmth in his gut. He wants to thank her, but his voice just won’t come except in these little whimpering groans. It’s pathetic, he knows, but every time he opens his mouth, the words die, strangled, on his tongue.

A flat hand rubs his back in wide circles with only the thin material of an undershirt stolen from Zeller’s closet to separate their skin. It’s good, Will thinks, so Bev doesn’t have to touch his filth. She would, though, and it makes Will feel sick again, like the worst kind of comedown he’s ever had.

“Alright,” she says, taking the empty glass from him, “get some rest. Do you want to stay here or go to the bed?”

There’s only one bed in Bev’s apartment, and Will doesn’t want to take it from her, so he makes a crude gesturing motion that’s meant to mean he’ll stay on the couch. Somehow, she understands him, and it’s a little blessing, like the tinnitus that came back halfway through his train ride to D.C. He’d taken the crisp fifty-dollar bill Hannibal offered on his way out, but he’d walked to the train station just to start clearing his head, just to feel his blood pumping again. If only the cash had come with his phone, maybe he wouldn’t feel like a whore.

Something about adrenaline probably dampened the ringing for a while, Price had guessed when he’d stopped in to say hello before he had to get back home for the telecom guy that’s supposed to be around to fix his internet. He left a small vase of flowers, white lilies like someone died. Maybe Will did, but he’s not quite sure yet. Zeller went into Price about it anyway, and they ignored Will to bicker for a full fifteen minutes, and it was almost normal enough that Will forgot why everyone came around in the first place. Even Jack video called over Bev’s phone to check up on him, although the gesture was cut short when Jack announced he had a dinner meeting with some record label executive and promptly ended the call.

“Can you leave?” Bev asks Zeller, blunt and pointed but not at all unkind.

With a shrug, Zeller says, “Yeah, alright. Should I come back tomorrow or just wait until Tuesday at the airport?”

“I’ll call you.”

He finally seems to take the hint, and he collects up his stuff, leaving behind a pile of clothes for Will to wear before they can get back to his house. Will left his own bag in Hannibal’s trunk, because he knew if he stayed long enough to get it, he’d stay forever.

It’s hard not to regret leaving, no matter how much Bev tells him it’s better this way, even if she doesn’t know why.

And then Zeller’s gone, and it’s just Will and Bev again, as it always is. Or always used to be. It’s comfortable, sort of, but Will still can’t overcome the melange of feelings that swirls in his gut, can’t relax his cramping muscles. It’d be better if he were bleeding, he thinks. Maybe he ought to get another tattoo. Maybe he ought to try to scrape out the infection that’s set into his knuckles, making the black letters there glow red hot, inflamed and angry and begging for a fight.

But he’s too tired for that, and as soon as Bev pulls out the pillows and blankets and starts to tuck him in, Will can’t keep his eyes open. But he doesn’t sleep. Can’t, even after he takes the sedative Bev offers him from a little amber bottle she keeps in her medicine cabinet.

She hovers around him long enough to make sure the pills go down, long enough to reach out and brush her fingers across the rope burns on his wrist.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He forces his eyes open to look at her, not caring that the angle gives her a double chin or that he’s staring straight up her nose. She’s his best friend, she’s the one that’s kept him around this long, and she’s more beautiful every single time he sees her, even in her ratty old Deep Purple t-shirt and faded running shorts. One of her pierced nipples pokes out of Ian Gillan’s hair, like an accidental crag in the illustration of carved rock.

In one of his scarce and sporadic letters to his father—forgiveness was a folly of his twenties—Will had said he and Bev were a couple, and that he’d propose soon. Just to press the salt in deeper, just to irritate the splinters in his father’s heart. In his own heart. How petty, he thinks, how sad he must have been to want nothing more than to piss off his dad, piss off the man that hurt him beyond pain. Of course, it did nothing, in the end, except hurt himself even more. He’d given up on the endeavor by age thirty, and now he’s exhausted by the thought of forgiving a dead man or forgiving the man he used to be.

Bev’s smile is gentle, the same kind she used to give him all the time when he woke up screaming from the nightmares, before they mellowed out with age. Or, at the very least, before his memory got worse and worse, and he can’t even remember the tendrils of fleeting terror long enough to scream about them and wake himself up.

“You can, if you want.” She hums as if to emphasize her willingness to listen, but Will shakes his head.

He wants to talk about it, he does. He wants to let all the words come spilling from his mouth like little moans and curses. He wants to explain the way Hannibal’s touch feels, the way his commands make Will’s entire body go malleable. He wants to confess everything he’s seen and done over the past almost-week. He wants to reward Bev’s love, her devotion, her friendship by being honest with her, for once in his life.

But he can’t, no matter how much he wants it. His voice just won’t come.

And, in another little blessing that makes Will’s throat clench up so tight he can’t breathe, Beverly gives him a tiny, forgiving nod.

“Make a racket if you need me,” she says quietly, patting Will’s shoulder as he nods back, and then she turns off the lights and he hears her pad off into her own room. It’s too early for her to sleep, but she leaves him alone anyway, and he’s not sure it’s the best idea but he’s glad for the space. It would be too quiet, if he were at his own house, but he can hear over the ringing the metro clambering along outside the window, the occasional squeal of the kids playing in the park across the street, the low murmur of Bev’s TV in her bedroom. She’s watching the news, or at least the voices have that newscaster cadence that starts to lull Will into a restless, sleepless daze where the hours pass instantly and not at all.

***

Every few minutes, Will’s thoughts tangent off to brush up against the memories of Hannibal that are cauterized into his mind, even when he actively tries to lead himself away from those dangerous paths.

The sky outside the window’s gone bruised blue, deepening to black the longer Will stares at it. There’s a moon hiding behind a cluster of trees, and it feels vaguely familiar, although Will’s still trying to dig through all the mess to place the memory. It’s slowly coming back to him, not when he actively tries to remember, but when he stares into space and gets lost in trying to feel Hannibal’s hands around his wrists again, or his breath against his skin.

When he remembers the ropes around his wrists, Will wants to cry. Not because the burns still hurt, although they do, but because he hates how jealous he is of himself. Or, at least, the version of himself that really got to experience it. Really got to be tied up and strung out and taken care of.

The ropes lead to the duct tape, and he swears he can almost taste the glue still, even though he’s had the orange juice and forced down a meager dinner and brushed his teeth in the meantime.

He tries to imagine what that kiss might have tasted like, and it kills him not to know whether or not there was one that he just can’t remember. He should remember something like that, he thinks. But he couldn’t even remember going back to Wolf Trap. He thought it was all an elaborate dream, fantasies of seeing Hannibal in _his_ space. And he hates that he can’t remember all of that, either. Just the snippets that stick to him like burrs.

Rolled up shirtsleeves and warm light in glittering eyes. A knife blade, dripping blood on the mud. A box of granola bars in the worst flavor ever made. Too sharp teeth hiding behind a thin smile.

Vampire, Will thinks, trying it over his lips although no sound comes out. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to that, and he resents the fact that he’ll have to, if he ever wants to see Hannibal again. And even if he didn’t—but he can’t fool himself, and he knows not seeing the man again isn’t exactly an option; fate wouldn’t have for it anyway, he imagines—even if he didn’t want to see Hannibal again, he’ll still have to get used to the thought of the man being a vampire, just because his mind won’t leave him alone until he does.

It’s absurd and impossible and everything his father would tell him he’s ridiculous for believing in. But now he can’t quite deny it, can he? Because he watched Hannibal pull Freddie’s hair aside and press his mouth against her throat—the memory strikes him suddenly, and it sends a shiver down his spine—and he felt that same mouth against his own throat. He’s still got the punctures on his neck, starting to itch as they scab over again where he ripped the old scabs away in a moment of mindless insanity.

Will rolls over on the couch until his nose presses into the cushions of the backrest. It’s an awkward position that has his back bowed so his curled up knees are nearly behind him. One hand plays at the edge of the cushion, and the other holds his blanket close to his body, trying to fight off the chill that rips through him like a violent wave.

He imagined infection feeling a bit nicer. It doesn’t even hurt, not really. He’s just tired, although it doesn’t do much to knock him out.

Maybe that’s what Hannibal meant by saying it takes a great deal of effort for him to fall asleep. The words come to Will effortlessly, still laced by the man’s accent, even though they’ve been evading him all day. He replays the moment over and over like it’s a practice track, lip syncing with the words that become a sort of mantra. It still doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.

For once, Will wants to beg for the nightmares.

There’s a lot to be done before their flight on Tuesday out to California. Will’s not sure he can do any of it. Antibiotics would probably be smart, he thinks. He needs new drumsticks. The dogs need food.

Will’s pathetic little groan is cracked and whiny when he remembers poor Winston. It would be easy, he realizes, to slip into that death spiral of panic he’s fallen into once before, but he doesn’t have the energy for it, so he just stares at the back of the couch and traces the blue weave pattern of the upholstery. He told Bev to get the red one, or even the black one, but she wanted blue. Now the blue reminds him of Hannibal’s pajamas.

If it were red, it’d be Bedelia’s car or Freddie’s blood. If it were black, it would be the river in the night or the great nothing that came as Hannibal took his first taste.

There’s no escape from the associations, and he’s still trying to accept that, along with the whole vampire thing. Somehow, it’s easier to wrap his head around the mythical reality than the incessant, flaking memories.

He sighs, so heavily he can smell his toothpaste as his breath bounces off the couch and hits him in the face again. The warmth of it slides across his cheeks like a flush, and Will thinks he’d probably be hard already if everything was normal. A bit curious to see if he can even manage, he reaches down to palm himself the way he likes it best, with pressure that’s just a bit too firm and with his thumbnail digging into the top of his shaft, even through his underwear. As he slips his hand under his waistband, wrapping his fingers around his soft cock, Will tries to think about all the erotic ideas he’s ever stored up, steadfastly trying to ignore Hannibal. Neither way works, and soon he’s got nothing but a dull frustration and a sore, chafing ache in his groin.

Deep down, part of him thinks he could probably bring himself off if he just imagined those lips on his neck again. But he’s too tired to imagine, so he just gives up and stares blankly off into the darkness of an apartment that isn’t his but used to feel like it. He’s not sure if it still does.

The clock on Bev’s microwave flashes the time. It’s a few more hours until dawn and a few more after that before Bev will be up and around. Will heaves another sigh, realizing he hasn’t been this bored since he was a kid on timeout, his bruised ribs aching and his eye starting to swell shut as he had to stare into the corner of his bedroom, where one too-white wall met another.

A melody darts in and out of his consciousness, and he’s not sure whether it’s a new one or one that’s been there before but has been hiding from him in the meantime. But he’s too tired to do anything about it, although he lets it envelop him and drag him back off to a sleepless daze that’s slightly more restful this time.

***

Will still can’t talk at lunch the next day, and now he can barely keep his eyes open, even though the argument Price and Zeller are having over the definition of various subgenres is plenty entertaining.

“No, you can’t call Nirvana fucking sludge metal,” Zeller spits, splattering Price with a half-chewed spray of bologna sandwich, which earns him a murderous glare and a hard kick to the shin. “That’s like saying tomatoes belong in a fruit salad. Are you a fucking sociopath?”

Price wipes his face down and swats the remaining sandwich out of Zeller’s hands. The bread and bologna fall apart on the way to the floor of Bev’s kitchen, smearing mayonnaise across the linoleum.

“Hey!” Bev snaps from her seat, where she’s otherwise absorbed in an issue of Guitarist magazine.

Waving her off, Zeller bends over to save his lunch, all while Price is saying, “Obviously grunge is the more complete category, but have you listened to _Bleach_ in the past ten years? Or since your last bender, you hopeless drunk.”

They go on at each other, and they both sound like pretentious assholes before they come to a fragile truce in getting sidetracked by how much they both love Soundgarden’s “Overfloater,” and how the band should do a heavier cover of the song before Zeller can’t hit any of the high notes anymore.

Will just stares at his own sandwich, still feeling like he might be sick if he eats more than one bite every ten minutes. Maybe this is what withdrawal’s like. For as much as he’s seen it in the people he’s known over the years, Will’s managed to avoid a chemical addiction, although he hasn’t been able to avoid the physical nagging of a body in need of its fix. But even his worst comedowns, after the trances, aren’t quite like this. Usually after a trance he’s so exhausted there’s nothing he can do except sleep. Now it feels impossible.

“Jack’s supposed to send over the flight info soon,” Bev says without looking up from her magazine. No one really cares, but she keeps going. “We need to check in as soon as he does so we can all get seats together.”

There’s a snort from one of the other guys, but Will can’t tell whether it’s Price or Zeller. But it’s Zeller that says, “What, you think I want to sit with this sociopath?” That gets him another kick to the shin, and he yelps around a bite of sandwich before swallowing and saying, “Fuck no, dick’s got no sense of personal space. He’ll pass out on my shoulder before the wheels go up.”

Will can’t help but laugh at that, just a little silent giggle. They all look at him expectantly, but he can only offer a one-sided shrug.

“You’ve got a good shoulder,” is Price’s only retort.

They fall into an easy silence then, and it lasts for almost an hour before Bev’s phone buzzes and she glances at the screen before saying, “Ah, fuck. Boards at eight.” Zeller gives her an incredulous look and she says, “Yes, in the morning, you hopeless drunk.”

“Don’t take his side!”

“I’m not taking sides. You _are_ a hopeless drunk.”

“Eh, fair. But I’m a hopeless drunk with a voice of gold.”

“For now!”

Will smiles into his glass of water. He’s missed this. It feels like it’s been a year, but it’s not even been a week. And then as soon as he thinks about missing this, he’s suddenly missing the meals across the table from Hannibal even more. His smile fades, and he’s just tired again. A blank sort of tired that makes everything else feel dull and too distant. It’s not close to a trance, not hardly.

He vaguely remembers riding in the passenger seat as their van came upon New York City, vaguely remembers feeling bored, vaguely remembers thinking that boredom was alright. He was wrong.

He’s bored out of his skull now, and it doesn’t hurt the way he likes.

Not even digging his nails into his infected knuckles helps, although it still brings tears to his eyes. He’s quick to blink them away before any of his band mates—his friends, his family, he has to remind himself—can see.

***

Bev lets Will borrow her car so he can go back to Wolf Trap to pack a bag and try to pull himself together. He knows going back alone isn’t the smartest idea. There’s too much there that will remind him of his last trip. And there’s too much to do, too, and he’s not sure he can do it all before he has to get back to D.C. to catch their flight in the morning.

Corral the dogs, buy dog food, pack a bag, get antibiotics, get some sleep, try not to cry, think about anything except Hannibal.

It’s almost twenty-four hours on the dot since he left Hannibal when he pulls up at his house, and he’s already failed on the last task of his list. He sits in the driver’s seat of Bev’s pale green Prius, letting the engine idle under him. It’s almost a miracle, he thinks, that he managed to drive here without getting into a wreck, as much of a wreck he is. Staring at his house like it belongs to someone else, trying to see the familiar porch and siding and windows and door through Freddie’s eyes, Will wonders if the police have been around to the falls recently or if they’re due for a visit soon.

He doesn’t know whether to believe Hannibal when he told Bedelia that he left Freddie alive. Not much reason to lie, he supposes. Not to the only person Hannibal apparently trusts, the only one that can put him in line without so much as a raised voice. So Freddie probably is out there still, thinking god knows what. Maybe thinking the same things Will is, about how absurd this all is, anyway.

Vampires.

Even in his head, he says it like a curse, but every time he does, it gets a little weaker, like a chorus repeated one time too many.

He looks around the front of the house from behind the windshield, which he hopes will protect him if Freddie’s there looking for him. The house looks like it always does, even when he searches for irregularities, but there’s a low dread still in Will’s gut that makes it feel wrong in ways he can’t really explain. It’s like going back to his childhood home after his dad died. It’s the same, but different, and now he has to sort out all the odds and ends that he hoped he’d never have to.

Sometimes it surprises him that his father’s been dead fifteen years. Will hasn’t seen him in twenty though, and those last five years apart were the only ones he ever felt like a kid, even sort of. Even though he was fifteen and too old to be buying cotton candy at the Six Flags on its first weekend open, before it was ever a Six Flags at all.

The Six Flags is gone now, like all the other things about his childhood that he sometimes wishes he could hold onto. All the bad things stick like wallpaper glue to the labyrinthine insides of his mind. But all the nice moments—all the parts he starts to reminisce about before he has to stop to school his breathing—they’re fading like the Six Flags and the muddy finger paintings on the old Hotpoint fridge where his dad kept the beer and the night crawlers and the cherry Jell-O.

Strange, he thinks, how those ancient memories are as clear as day, and the things that happened to him just yesterday feel fuzzy and old. But fading with every day, one by one, until he’s nothing but a perfectly blank slate. Tabula rasa, Price would say before jumping into a long, philosophical explanation that Will’s never been interested in.

He’s starting to wonder if his old man would like the river up here, hidden away in the trees. Then he wonders if he’d like the house that Will’s carefully, chaotically curated over the years. But he knows his father hated that drum kit, and as soon as he starts thinking what his father would say if he knew what all happened recently, Will has to force himself to think about something else before the deeply ingrained anxiety sets in.

It takes him another five minutes before he shuts off the engine and clambers out of the car.

A string of yapping and barking starts up as the porch stairs creak under his weight—somehow he feels heavier now than he did even two nights ago—and Will frowns slightly. Can’t be mad, though, because he thought all the dogs were lost to the wilderness, let out in their animal panic and forgotten in a too-human, too-monstrous fervor. He remembers the entire pack escaping through the open front door, poor bleeding Winston taking up the rear. He certainly doesn’t remember the corralling that must have taken ages and lots of rustling of the nearly empty food bag.

He pauses in front of the door, staring at its peeling paint and feeling like an uninvited visitor. Ridiculous, he knows. He shared his home once, for all of a night and no more, but now it doesn’t feel like it belongs to him. But what can he do about that feeling?

Sighing, Will turns the handle and finds it unlocked. A minor blessing, considering he doesn’t have a key or even know where his has disappeared off to. Probably somewhere in Hannibal’s house. Even thinking about that house hurts, thinking about the taste of peach juice and the smell of old, stagnant air. Thirty-five years. It tugs at the back of his mind, and Will’s still not sure what to make of it. Doesn’t know if there is anything to make of it, except the low and gnawing suspicion that Hannibal’s known him a lot longer than he’s known Hannibal.

The dogs swarm around his legs, and it’s a more bittersweet homecoming than last time. Winston’s there, nosing at his thigh under unfamiliar blue denim, apparently smelling Will under Zeller’s detergent. Another minor blessing.

Zoe, however, keeps back. Doesn’t even half look at him. Strange, Will thinks, until he remembers how Hannibal had picked the little dog up, stared into her eyes as if there were words passing between them. Even now that he has a superficial answer to all his questions— _vampire_ , thought with a heavy dose of resentment—even now, very little of it makes sense. It’s not falling together like a jigsaw puzzle the way Will wants. It’s not like mixing an album in the studio, where it’s obvious if not easy to isolate one track over another. Instead, it’s like listening to the cacophony of a symphony’s warmup, searching for the scherzo in the mess.

Strange, to be thinking in terms of classical music. The basis of his own, but so fundamentally different as well.

Too much thinking, Will tells himself as he closes the front door behind him, reaching down to pet each dog. It’s not nearly as pleasant or relieving as usual. Feels almost like a chore, to give them all the love he’s empty of. Where did it go? Lost in the river, he tells himself, taken over the falls and too far gone to chase after now.

He has to consciously clear his mind every few breaths for the next fifteen minutes, as he bustles around his house and packs a bag with the necessities. He takes a minute to stare at the mess of his practice kit, then sucks in a deep, calming breath before kneeling to put it all back together again. His ride cymbal, all hammered bronze and smudged fingerprints, is cracked beyond fixing. No amount of drilling could fix it, make its timbre as brash and bright as Will remembers. Easier just to buy a new one, although that prospect hurts in a way Will doesn’t really expect.

It’s not like his drumsticks, which he knows are essentially disposable. They don't last long, and he knows that when he buys them. But that ride? He’s had that ride close to ten years, and its death hurts him.

Hurts even more when he remembers in a shock of sensation how it was ruined.

His cheeks burn hot, and now not just from the infection raging in his hands. They’re sore as he rearranges the kit the way he likes, with one floor tom a few inches behind the other, and with both kick pedals at a nonstandard angle, just the way his anatomy fits in with the instrument.

Winston lingers in his bedroom, and Will sits on the bed, glancing between the dog and the headboard, where a careful coil of natural rope is laid across the pillow. There’s no blood on the sheet, none even on Winston’s face, where Will intimately remembers the deep cut being. Had he imagined it? No, that was real. He’s sure of it, even if he’s not sure why or how.

He wants to ask Winston what happened, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out but a hoarse, meaningless whisper. Not that the dog could have put meaning to the almost-words, anyway.

Will’s never felt so alone, so sick.

***

After a trip to an urgent care in a town half an hour away, which went exactly as well as it could have, considering Will still couldn’t speak, he opens his new amber bottle of antibiotics and swallows one dry, trying to ignore the way it catches in his throat like a scream that feels like a nightmare or a hazy memory.

They’re coming back to him, slowly. He’s almost pieced together the entire time he spent with Hannibal, although it feels more distant than it should. Barely a few days to break him, it turns out. Barely a few days to become something even his conscious mind wants to forget. Will would be ashamed, but he’s still too fucking tired for that. Angry at his own lethargy, he can’t do anything but lay in bed, staring up at the familiar ceiling and mindlessly petting the dogs that curl around him. A blanket covers one leg and half of his belly, but the other half is bare to the still air, and he still feels too simultaneously hot and cold.

To be expected, the doctor at the urgent care had said as she noted something on the computer screen that was angled just so Will couldn’t see. A natural reaction to the infection, proof that the body is fighting back against the mess that wants to destroy him. A fever, too high to be safe, not high enough to fill an ER bed.

Antibiotics and ibuprofen, and all will be fine. He’ll make the show in California no problem, although he might feel a bit weak for the next few days. That’s what the doctor assured him, although he doesn’t really believe it.

Sleeping in his bed feels forbidden, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because he still can’t sleep, and the fact of it is driving him insane with each passing hour. It hits him suddenly that the last person to sleep in this bed was Hannibal. Or maybe not. Will’s not sure how sleeping—the way he knows it, at least—works for a vampire. If Hannibal does sleep night to night, or if he only disappears into thirty-five year hibernations and won’t close his eyes otherwise.

The more he thinks about the phantoms of Hannibal’s body under and over him, Will thinks he can catch a whiff of the doctor’s fresh scent, and it sends him back to dinner with the dogs surrounding them to beg for a gourmet meal made from his pantry’s junk.

Sighing heavily, Will scratches Winston’s belly in lazy strokes, and his tongue lolls out, content or doing a very convincing job pretending so.

He should just get up and drive back to D.C., stay with Bev for the night and not have to worry about the early morning traffic that might catch him and make him late. But there’s nothing Will wants to do less than crawl out of bed. Especially when this is the bed where Hannibal was so close to him. Tasted him. It sounds less strange every time Will considers it, to the point that now it’s starting to sound normal. It’s like when the band’s jamming and someone hits a slightly off chord, and they just repeat it a few times until it sounds purposeful.

“Jazzy!” Price would comment a few bars later. Zeller would follow up with a smirking glare, Bev would roll her eyes, and Will would be lost in it all. Later, the mistakes don’t feel so much like mistakes. Like thinking over and over how Hannibal had tasted him. _Just a taste_. What does that even mean? How much is a taste? How much blood can he stand to lose before it’s more than a taste? Hannibal had tasted him.

Of course Hannibal tasted him. Of course. That’s what happens, isn’t it? Will had wanted to taste him, too, hadn’t he? Wanted nothing more than to taste Hannibal’s mouth, savor him, memorize it for times like this.

Except, he hadn’t wanted to taste Hannibal. Not like that. Not like a vampire.

Now the word taste doesn’t sound like a word anymore as he says it silently, trapped in his own head. Price would call it semantic satiation, and it wouldn’t change a thing.

Will throws himself out of bed before he thinks himself in circles again. His sigh is more a frustrated grunt, and he sits at the edge of his bed, head in his hands, while startled dogs try to claim the warm spot he left behind. Feed the dogs, he reminds himself, and it gives him something to do other than confuse himself and thrash wildly all the way to the falls.

He wanders to the kitchen, hoping whatever’s left in that nearly-empty food bag will last the night. He’ll leave cash for the sitter to buy a new bag. Or he’ll go to the store in the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep. Or he’ll—

It’s unnecessary to buy another bag, because there’s a brand new one sitting in the lower cabinet. Will frowns at the dog food, and his throat starts to tighten. Even after all the reconstruction of his memory—and he was convinced he had all the important parts now—he doesn’t remember this. It’s such a small thing, a mundanity that should have otherwise gone unnoticed or, at best, mildly appreciated.

Instead it pierces him like an electric shock, and he’s shaking as he stares at the smiling dog printed on the bag’s front.

Never been so fucking confused, so fucking unbalanced. Never been reduced to tears over dog food. Over plenty of other tiny, ridiculous things—a beer missing from the refrigerator, a rip in a beloved old tour shirt, a melody lost to a trance before he could grab his phone to record it—but never over dog food. He feels impossibly small, trapped in his too-tight, too-bright skin, and so fucking tired he can’t even reach up to wipe the tears away.

It takes him the better part of an hour to open the new bag and scoop out two bowls. The pack doesn’t come running at first, and even when he rattles the metal bowls, only two come to nibble. They’re full, Will realizes. They’ve already been fed. They’ve had their taste as well.

He packs his bag and is out the door in less than ten minutes, and when he comes back to himself, he’s halfway back to D.C., with old Cannibal Corpse turned up so loud he can feel the rhythms in the steering wheel even though he can’t really hear it over the ringing in his ears.

***

Zeller apparently hates airports, and even though it’s hours before he’s usually awake, even though he’s only had half a cup of coffee and nothing more than a banana smeared with peanut butter, he’s so fucking loud Will can’t stand it. Constant chattering, constant complaining, so bad even Jack is getting fed up with him. Bev’s already tried her usual snappish remarks, to no avail, and Price stopped bickering with him fifteen minutes ago, when they got to their gate.

“Why’s it smell like someone pissed in an old humidifier and then put some fucking essential oils in it, holy fuck, it stinks.” The singer’s knee bounces and jostles all the seats connected to his own. “I’d rather breathe the fucking canned air on that death trap we’re about to willingly—”

Shoving his earbuds into place, Will drowns out the rest of his rambling, meaningless point with the practice recordings he put on Bev’s old iPod. It’s stuck at max volume, and the touch wheel only works if he puts pressure on the screen. He misses his phone. Doesn’t want to buy another one. This will do. The louder the better, right now.

He closes his eyes, letting his body twitch as he imagines sitting at his kit. He’s too exhausted to really mime along with the hard parts.

A hand brushes his shoulder, and he flinches so violently while he rips out his earbuds that Bev has to say, “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Just me.” Once he focuses on her face and takes a deep breath, embarrassed and pitiful, she gives him a careful smile and says, “Plane’s boarding, come on.”

Digging his boarding pass out of his pocket, Will nods and picks up his bag.

13A. Window seat.

Good, he thinks. He can lean his head against the wall, stare out over the clouds, try to let the loud rumble of the jet engine lull him to sleep. He remembers how the engine of Hannibal’s car put him out like a baby, and all he can think about now is how much he’d rather be curled up in that backseat, watching through half-closed bedroom eyes the way the street lamps and neon signs illuminate Hannibal’s face in bright, colorful streaks like ephemeral tattoos.

Zeller’s still bitching as they trudge down the jet bridge with a mass of red-eyed, suited businesspeople and a boisterous group of college kids who keep talking about how much they’re going to tan at the beach.

“Never met a psychopath like a fucking flight attendant.” Zeller scowls at the woman who greets them with a perfunctory smile and one of those two-fingered points toward the main cabin, as if there’s any direction to go other than down the tight aisle.

“Brian, I swear I will rip out your vocal cords if you don’t shut up,” Bev says, a bit meaner than usual. She’s scowling too—they all are—and it finally seems to get through to the singer, whose bravado seems to be replaced by something that looks suspiciously like anxiety. Will thinks he probably needs a drink, even though it’s barely eight in the morning. Maybe especially because it’s so early.

Although, for Will, time seems to bleed into itself. If someone told him it was midnight and another told him it was noon, he’d believe both, even if he had a clock that said otherwise right in front of his face. Circadian rhythms or something. Price would probably know, but Will doesn’t have the energy to ask, and even if he did, the answer wouldn’t help anything. Like other answers he’s gotten recently, he thinks with a bitter sneer that draws the attention of a blonde businesswoman in first class. Will thinks it’s Bedelia at first, but when he blinks and takes a second look, the woman is instead pushing sixty, bottle-blonde, and wearing a decidedly frumpy blazer and scarf combo that the real Bedelia would never consider.

With a sigh, Will shoves his bag in the overhead compartment and slides into his seat, staring out at the tarmac under the early morning sun—clouds wait on the horizon, but it looks like they’ll just miss whatever storm is coming. Bev sits just behind him, and Price and Zeller are sharing the other side of the aisle two rows back. Jack’s the odd man out, way back by the lavatory, and Will’s hoping against hope that the seat beside him will remain blessedly empty.

Other passengers file in, slowly but surely, and the flight attendants come down the aisle to close the overhead compartments, and the seat beside Will is still empty, even when the rest of the plane is full.

Small blessings.

He shoves his earbuds back in, fiddling with Bev’s old iPod until he can’t hear anything over the aggressive snares of his breakdown in Animas. His eyes fall closed and his hands twitch in tiny approximations of his playing. During the bridge, where Zeller and Price chug along without guitar or drums as a backbone, Will reaches up to brush his fingers over the twin scars at his neck, mostly healed now even though the skin of his knuckles is still struggling to patch up.

That’s when someone taps his knee, and his eyes blink open with a violent jolt, ripping out his earbuds with a wet-sounding pop, to finally focus on a too-familiar shock of copper curls.

“I hoped I might find you here,” Freddie says, guarded in a way Will’s never seen her.

He’s not sure what strange instinct it is that compels him to look for recorders on her—nothing in her hand, ears not visible under the mess of hair—before opening and closing his mouth repeatedly, like a fish, unable to find the words to say _what the fuck!_

“I have a few questions.”

“Freddie Lounds?” Bev asks from behind them, peering through the crack between their seats. “What are you doing here?”

Will’s heart is racing, pounding up into his throat with an intensity he can’t swallow back. For once, he’s fucking glad he can’t talk. Can’t accidentally say the wrong thing. Can’t let something slip that he can’t take back, no matter how much he tries. He knows, deep in the back of his mind in a place he doesn’t like to acknowledge, that if Freddie gets any closer, she’ll have to die. A scare won’t be enough.

Offering an impatient smile to Bev while the flight attendants finish their safety demonstration, Freddie says, “Just got lucky, I guess. But like I said, I do have a few questions for Will.”

“Lucky.” Bev’s voice is nothing but a dark murmur, and Will almost hopes she’ll snap at Freddie, tell her off. Demand to know how she found out their flight information, how she managed to get seat 13B. It’d be a long story, Will’s sure, and one that begins in Wolf Trap. Bev doesn’t need to know that. What if she did, Will wonders. What if he could tell her everything the way he desperately wants to but won’t. Why’s he protecting Hannibal, asks something from the deepest recesses of his consciousness, where his survival instinct is strongest. Why protect the man who’s clearly so dangerous and even more clearly an imminent threat?

Except he’s not, Will tells himself. Hannibal let him go. For as threatening as he might be to anyone else, he let Will go. Didn’t even comment beyond offering—no, insisting—to pay Will’s train ticket.

He’s staring blankly across the width of the plane, out the opposite window as early-morning D.C. shrinks beneath them, until Freddie waves a hand in his face and he snaps back into his body only to feel the crushing weight of exhaustion and hear the ever-present ringing of his tinnitus, quieter now under the hum of the jet engines. Not like Hannibal’s car in the least.

“Will?” She sounds a bit freaked, halfway concerned, halfway scared. Sounds about right. He stares at her expectantly in lieu of the words he can’t quite verbalize. Searching his eyes—maybe finding them completely empty, the way he’s starting to feel now—Freddie frowns and lowers her voice to say, “Is he coming to the next show?”

Bev hears it anyway and shoves her face between their seats. All the better, Will thinks, turning to stare out his own window again. Let Bev run interference. Let Bev answer the hard questions.

He zones out, going somewhere where their voices sound like insectile buzzing instead of intelligible communication, and he watches with a disinterested focus how the details of the earth disappear under the cloud cover, until all he can see is an ethereal sea of sunlit white. It seems like he should be able to swim in it, or drown. But he knows, with whatever logical part of his mind remains, that he’d only fall. Catapult to the ground, be crushed into a bony paste. His skull would explode. He’d be dead before he feels the pain.

A terrible prospect, dying painlessly, without any of that headless, agonizing ecstasy.

Maybe the shock would help him sleep, if he fell out of the sky. If the plane crashed, if the cabin depressurized and made his blood expand too quickly, like a dangerously rapid ascent from a deep dive.

“You must know,” says a whisper, warm across the shell of Will’s ear. He flinches and whips his head around to stare at Freddie, who’s looking at him with such a curious fire that he can barely stand her bright eyes on him. Not the whisper he’d like, then. Not the wordless murmur that warms him from the inside, rolling over words with an accent that sounds more natural than Will’s own.

He frowns at her but says nothing. Couldn’t even if he wanted. Doesn’t want to.

“What is he?” she asks lowly, glancing aside to where Bev was. But the guitarist is gone now, curled up and engrossed in her own book. How long has it been? Will spares a glance out the window again and finds the sun rising in reverse, setting in the east as they hurtle westward through the air in a metal death trap, the kind Zeller kept bitching about all the way through security.

Will glances down to Freddie’s neck, finds two familiar pinprick scars, pale but quickly healing over. When he looks up at her, she’s tracing the same pattern down his neck, catching on the curling tattoos before finding the mermaid and her new piercings.

He’s overdue for his antibiotics. Feverish and faint, he barely hears her say, not a doubt or question in her voice, “You too.” For once, she doesn’t seem like she’s looking for an answer, which is good, because Will doesn’t really have one to give her. Not one he wants to give, at least.

It’s not sleep that he falls into then, but a strange sort of trance that makes time stand still until early-morning California breaks through the clouds.

**Author's Note:**

> on [twitter](https://twitter.com/supernovamare) <3


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